


mi 



WBmMM 

H V.V.-V.; • 

'••••:.'.'■.•''■ 
j • : '.••'■'■ i •. ; . 

' ' '^ v' : 

• ■* ' ■'. ■ '• '■■ ■ I 



SI 



Mi 




JL„ 



I MilSEK 



I 



**. 1 



x 0o. 

























V 



V 






A 0> 

A"* 






°^ 



"O 






o5 ^ 



x y f^'r-. 



"■?, s 














V rX 




°o 

































j* 






* * 






^v 5 












% Y^ 









^ 









1 * 



■ 



^ 



.Oo, 



*V <s> 















OTHER BOOKS BY WM. L. STIDGER 



GIANT HOURS WITH POET PREACHERS 
STAR DUST FROM THE DUGOUTS 



OUTDOOR 
MEN AND MINDS 



By 

WILLIAM L. STIDGER 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



; 



Copyright, 1920, by 
WILLIAM L. STIDGER 



©GU604294 



WOW On iqoq 



I 






Dedicated to My Father 

LEROY L. STIDGER 

Who for Many Years Was 

A Father-Mother to 

Five Little Tots, and Who 

Gave to Them a Heritage 

Of Home and Love Which is 

Better Than Gold 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Opening the Door . Bishop Wm. A. Quayle 1 1 

Introduction 13 

I. The Trees of the Bible 21 

II. Storms of the Bible 42 

III. The Mountains of the Bible 65 

IV. Rivers of the Bible 82 

V. The Bible and the Sea 94 

VI. The Desert and the Bible 111 

VII. The Stars and the Bible 122 

VIII. The Birds of the Bible 140 

IX. BURBANK AND THE BOOK 164 

X. MUIR AND THE MASTER 175 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

The vespers of a tree 9 

"And the leaves of the tree were for the healing 
of the nations" 21 

"And a great and strong wind rent the moun- 
tains" 43 

"A sentinel pine on Mount Taishan, in China; said 

to be the oldest worshiping place on earth". . 65 

"He leadeth me beside the still waters" 83 

"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and 

here shall thy proud waves be stayed" 95 

"The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; 
and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as 
the rose" in 

"When I consider thy heavens" 123 

"We spread our wings on the winds of light" 141 

Climbing the dune 165 

"I like sunshine, the blue sky, trees"— Burbank. . . . 175 



THE VESPERS OF A TREE 

A T evening time along the sea 
- ^^ I like to watch an ancient tree, 
Where gently at the close of day- 
It bows its leafy head to pray. 

This is the Vesper Hour of trees ; 

There is an Angelus that rings 
With sweetest music through the leaves- 

An evening wind that softly sings. 

Stand all alone and silently, 
In mood of prayer and reverently, 
And you shall see that gray old tree 
At Vespers bowing wistfully. 

You'll hear a whisper soft and low, 
As of One speaking tenderly, 

And in the wandering winds that blow 
You'll hear God talking to that tree. 



OPENING THE DOOR 
By Bishop Wm. A. Quayle 

TO write an introduction to this book 
written by William L. Stidger is to 
be classed under the Scripture head- 
ing, "A Superfluity of Naughtiness." Reading 
the chapter captions suffices to head one 
straight into the book, like a diver plunging 
into the sea. 

Such as have read his war characterizations 
and his interviews of soul with the poets of our 
own times, and his wanderings in the Orient 
looking for Christ along the ways of loneliness, 
will need no informing that this book will be 
worth reading. 

This author has a seeing eye, and a hearing 
ear, and an attent heart, and a poet pulse, and a 
sense of yearning which is on all elect spirits. 
He loves many things and matters and folks. 
He is companionable. His enthusiasms are 
wholesome and contagious. 

It will be sweet to be with him out of doors, 
with him anywhere, and will prove a sure 

ii 



12 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

delight to be with him in the Bible out of doors. 
I open the door into this winsome, worthy book 
which shall bring us to many a way and place 
where we shall meet God face to face. 



INTRODUCTION 

RAYMOND ROBINS speaks in his 
remarkable series of articles on Russia 
• of the "Indoor Diplomacy" that so 
bungled affairs during the crucial days of the 
Great War. And he avers that "indoor diplo- 
macy" is the direct result of an "indoor mind." 
Certainly, the Book of books was not thought 
out, conceived, nurtured or given birth by men 
with "indoor minds"; rather it was produced 
by men whose hearts and dreams and hopes 
and thoughts were washed by the cleansing 
rains, swept pure by the white winds, sanctified 
by the purifying sunshine, baptized by the holy 
dews of night and morning, lighted by star 
light, perfumed by blossoming flowers and 
trees, made strong by the iron of mountains, 
and shot full of dreams by those who lived 
amid the stars. The Bible is an out-of-doors 
book. 

It starts out in its first chapters with a great 
outdoor story of creation and it ends up with a 
great outdoor vision of things to be. The great 
incidents of the Bible occur in the great open. 
The great moments in the life of the great 

13 



i 4 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

characters of the Bible, including Jesus the 
Christ, are staged along the highways, beside 
rivers and lakes, on some mountain height, or 
in some green meadow. 

We have this thought of the Bible as an out- 
of-doors book in a general way, but when one 
starts to investigate the thesis carefully he is 
actually startled with the avalanche of evidence 
that sweeps down upon him to pile up facts sup- 
porting this truth. 

The book of Genesis is itself a great ocean. 
One walks along its shores all through that 
book and hears the first singing of the new- 
born surf and the play of tides from the new 
moon and the warmth of sunlight from the 
new-born sun. 

Every single incident of the book of Exodus 
is an out-of-doors incident. He who doubts 
this statement has but to read this wonderful 
story from beginning to end. It deals with 
out-of-doors men. men who never knew what 
a roof was. 

And while Leviticus deals largely with laws, 
it too is a great open-air book, and "flocks" 
and "herds" and "harvests" and "grains" 
make up a large part of its thought. 

Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles too are 
largely out-of-doors chronicles, for they deal 



INTRODUCTION 15 

with kingdoms and with wars ; and wars must 
needs be fought out of doors. 

Job is the only great drama in the world of 
art that is too big to be staged any place but 
out of doors. You can't confine a whirlwind 
indoors and you can't stage a sky full of stars 
within four meager walls. 

The Psalms are limited only by the starry 
skies, "the winds before the dawn/' when "the 
morning stars sing together," while "the hart 
panteth after the waterbrook." 

The great incidents of Isaiah are continu- 
ally happening in the out-of-doors; on moun- 
taintops, along city streets, accompanied by 
storms, lightnings, thunderings. 

The Prophets, each one of them and all of 
them, were great, rugged men of skies and 
mountains and "trimmers of sycamore trees." 
Most of the disciples, Jesus Christ himself, and 
Paul the "tent-maker," were men of the fields 
and highways. Jesus was born in a stable and 
died on a cross and ascended from a mountain 
peak. Paul was converted on a highway, and 
the first four were called from the seashore. 

The book of Revelation is a great Yosemite, 
with voices, voices, voices sounding every- 
where. 

No indoor mind can fully understand the 



16 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Bible. Almost every parable that Jesus spoke 
was a Parable of the Out-of-Doors. He was 
talking to nomads and to agriculturists. 

The great figures of speech of the Bible 
are "shepherd/' "herdsman/' "vineyard," 
"Saviour." 

We never think of Christ as belonging in- 
doors. He walked the highways, he prayed on 
the mountainsides, he went into a garden, and 
he died on a lonely hill. The few times that he 
went inside one might count on the fingers of 
one hand. We never think of God as an in- 
doors God. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Paul, 
Moses, John of Patmos, Jesus the Christ — 
they were all too big to be confined. They 
would not have felt at home indoors. We can- 
not conceive of them belonging at any time in- 
side of a church or a house. They worshiped 
out of the walls of their times, they prophesied, 
they preached from pulpits of great rocks and 
mountainsides. Even David, the gentle poet 
of them all, was from his days of herding 
sheep to the end an out-of-doors man. 

And because I have been so deeply impressed 
with this great truth I make bold to call atten- 
tion to the fact that the greatest incidents of 
the Book of books occurred amid the moun- 
tains, along the rivers and lakes ; in the deserts, 



INTRODUCTION 17 

on the seas, and have to do with the trees, the 

stars, the birds, and the storms of the Bible. 

For perchance, when one catches this breath 

of the good God's great open, and feels its 

sunshine on his face, ever thereafter he may 

not be able to sail a storm, or stand beneath 

the shade of a tree, or hear sweet singing of a 

bird, or sound of surf from sea or forest, catch 

a daydawn, or a starlit night that Christ and 

God seem not nearer. It is so with this humble 

man: 

I never see a lake or tree 

But Christ is very near to me ; 

Nor ride an ocean in a storm 

But through the dark I see His form; 

Remembering in the other years 

He walked the waves and calmed the fears 

Of men like unto me; 

And died upon a tree. 

I never see a shining star 

On the horizon, still and far, 

Nor walk the fields at night, 

But I can see the light 

Which shone so long ago 

On watching shepherds there below; 

And angel voices sing to me 

Of Him who came triumphantly. 

No sunset glows along the sky 
Nor soft wind passes by 
But somehow He is very near 
And close to me; and dear 



18 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

As memories of other days 

When He too walked these wind-washed ways 

Of earth and felt the glow 

And glory of the world I know. 

I never walk along the way 

Of mountain paths when somber day 

Has died behind the west; 

And feel the touch of earth's warm breast 

But I remember 'twas His way; 

He sought the mountain sides to pray 

Beneath the trees and stars of night; 

To wait the dawn and catch the light ! 

I never see a grove of trees 
But He is there upon His knees ; 
Nor walk, however joyfully, 
Through garden ways but I can see 
My Christ in His Gethsemane; 
His triumph and His victory; 
The rock-strewn pathway of His tears, 
The garden of His human fears. 

So rocks and lakes and storms and trees; 
So meadow-lands and stars and seas ! 
Flowers and birds and mountain- ways ; 
The dawning and the dying days ; 
The silent watches of the night; 
The darkness, fogs — the clouds — the light 
Through magic mists of memory 
Bring Jesus very close to me." 

The author desires to thank the publishers 
for permission to quote the following: Extracts 
from John Muir, granted by Houghton Mifflin 



INTRODUCTION 19 

Company; the paragraphs on Brashear, the 
star-man, granted by the American Magazine ; 
the lines from Robert Service, granted by 
Barse & Hopkins; "Trees," by Joyce Kilmer, 
granted by George H. Doran Company; and 
the storm description in the chapter on 
"storms," taken from "The Land of To- 
Morrow," the author of which is Robert Louis 
Stevenson, published by George H. Doran 
Company, and to Luther Burbank, who 
granted the author an interview and gave per- 
mission to quote the paragraphs in the chapter 
on that great scientist. 



CHAPTER I 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 

"I think that I shall never see 
A poem lovely as a tree. 

"A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed 
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast; 

"A tree that looks at God all day, 
And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 

"A tree, that may, in Summer, wear 
A nest of robins in her hair; 

"Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 
Who intimately lives with rain. 

"Poems are made by fools like me, 
But only God can make a tree." 

SO writes Joyce Kilmer, he who died on 
the battlefields of tree-dead France. 
And surely God must have had a joy 
in making trees; such joy as a poet has in 
making poems in his small way; and surely 
God must have wanted to call the attention of 
the world to His trees and to their spiritual 

21 



22 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

lessons, for so many times in the Book of books 
He puts it into the hearts of those who speak 
and write His words to use trees as figures of 
speech to make emphatic or tender or pertinent 
some great spiritual truth that He wishes to 
convey to mankind down through the coming 
generations. 

And so God made his trees not only to be 
useful to mankind with their food and shade, 
but he also made them to teach mankind 
spiritual truths. 

The Bible, from beginning to end, is full of 
trees. The Bible is like a great highway from 
the beginning of time until the end of Revela- 
tion, and all along that great highway from the 
Atlantic Coast of Genesis and the Creation, to 
the Pacific Coast of the book of Revelation, 
shading the humanity that walks its myriad 
way, feeding and comforting, are trees — trees 
of every kind. 

Some of the trees of the Holy Land and 
Syria, where Jesus was wont to walk, are: 
tamarisk, orange, lemon, citrus, maple, sumach, 
moringa, acacia, almond, cherry, plum, apple, 
pear, hawthorn, olive, fir, elm, mulberry, fig, 
sycamore, walnut, alder, ironwood, hazel, oak, 
beech, willow, poplar cypress^ juniper, ye\f 
pine, cedar, spruce, palm. 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 23 

Hastings says that the mountains and hills 
and valleys of the Holy Land are now for the 
most part bare of their trees. In the days of 
Christ they were covered with great forests. 

One of the most beautiful legends I take 
from Hastings. It is that of "The Tree/' 
which is by inference "The Cross." "The 
name no doubt originated because of the prac- 
tice of employing a tree in case of haste for the 
purpose of crucifixion." 

Many references in the New Testament 
refer to "the tree," meaning the cross of Christ. 

In mediaeval times there was a legend which 
told of how Adam, when he was dying, sent 
his son Seth to the angel that guarded paradise 
to beg a bough from the Tree of Life. The 
angel granted this request, but when Seth got 
back to his father, he found him dead. So he 
planted the bough of the tree on Adam's grave. 
In the course of time Solomon was building the 
temple and cut the tree down to use in the 
temple, but it refused to be fitted into any part 
of the temple, so he used it for a bridge over a 
stream. By and by the Queen of Sheba came 
to visit Solomon, and refused to walk over that 
tree because she recognized that it was the tree 
on which the Saviour was to die. Long after- 
ward the Jews took the tree and cast it into a 



24 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

stagnant pool. From that time on the tree 
gave this pool miraculous healing powers; an 
angel descended from time to time and troubled 
the waters, and whoever stepped into the 
waters immediately after this troubling was 
healed of diseases. There it remained until 
Christ was crucified, and then it was taken 
from the pool and fashioned into a cross on 
which the Saviour of the world died. 

Hastings also calls attention to the interest- 
ing fact that 'The fathers loved to contrast the 
first tree whose fruit brought death into the 
world, and the second tree whose leaves are for 
the healing of the nations." 

Old Testament Trees 

The first reference to trees is in Genesis 3. 
22-24. It * s a figure of speech that runs all 
through the Bible. It gets its start early. 

"And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is 
become as one of us, to know good and evil: 
and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take 
also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for- 
ever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth 
from the garden of Eden, to till the ground 
from whence he was taken." 

It is an intensely dramatic picture and it is 
followed by one just as dramatic; even spec- 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 25 

tacular. It is the picture of a flaming sword 
guarding that important tree of life : 

"So he drove out the man; and he placed at 
the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubims, 
and a flaming sword which turned every way, 
to keep the way of the tree of life." 

As it is to-day both the living and the dead 
find rest under the beneficent shade of the quiet 
old trees. Many a child has known the joy of 
a shady tree after a long, hard, hot walk on a 
summer day. And we who study trees to-day 
must remember that Palestine is a hot country 
and the shade of a friendly tree was more than 
welcome. And what man, woman, or child in 
this day and nation who does not have a 
memory of a little God's Acre shaded by pro- 
tecting trees ? 

All over New England one remembers the 
little cemeteries in a circle of pine trees where 
the dead rest with patches of sunlight playing on 
white, moss-touched tombs. Some of them were 
leaders in the Revolutionary War; some of 
them were great poets; some were Presidents 
and some were musicians ; but all of them rest 
where the blue flower raises its petals in spring- 
time, and where a carpet of pine needles makes 
soft the tread of reverent feet. Ofttimes stone 
walls hold the world at respectful distance, and 



26 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

through the centuries they sleep beneath the 
trees. In fact, it seems to be a well established 
custom to surround cemeteries with trees. 

So it was in Old Testament times. Both the 
dead and the living rested beneath the shady- 
trees. Two references will give these pictures : 

First Samuel, chapter thirty-one, verse 
thirteen, gives this vivid picture: "And they 
took their bones, and buried them under a tree 
at Jabesh." 

There is a beautiful picture of the visit of the 
three angels and Jehovah to Abraham. The 
story is in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, 
and it starts off : "And Jehovah appeared unto 
him in the plains of Mamre: 1 and he sat in 
the tent door in the heat of the day." 

What child or grown-up shall ever cease to 
be stirred with Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the 
tree, as described in the fourth chapter of 
Daniel? "Thus were the visions of mine head 
in my bed ; I saw, and behold a tree in the midst 
of the earth, and the height thereof was great. 
The tree grew, and was strong, and the height 
thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight 
thereof to the end of all the earth. The leaves 
thereof were fair, and the fruit thereof much, 
and in it was meat for all: the beasts of the 

'Revised Version, "oaks of Mamre." 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 2j 

field had shadow under it, and the fowls of the 
heaven dwelt in the boughs thereof, and all 
flesh was fed of it." 

The Bible reader will remember the rest of 
the story. It was that a man appeared out of 
heaven and cut this tree down, and scattered 
its leaves over the face of the earth, but left the 
roots thereof. The old king wanted an inter- 
pretation of what his dream meant and brave 
Daniel told him without a moment's hesitation. 
He told him that it meant that the tree was the 
king, and that God would cut him down in 
spite of his power until he recognized Jehovah 
as King over all the earth; but that if he did 
recognize him, the promise of the remain- 
ing root was that his kingdom should grow 
again. 

The fable of Jotham in the ninth chapter of 
Judges is intensely interesting from the stand- 
point of the story itself, without reference to 
its interpretation, which is too complicated for 
this chapter — a matter which more rightly 
belongs to another type of book. But it is in- 
teresting in reference to the subject. It starts 
in the eighth verse and is a simple story: 

"The trees went forth on a time to anoint a 
king over them; and they said unto the olive 
tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree 



28 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

said unto them, Should I leave my fatness 
wherewith by me they honor God and man, and 
go to be promoted over the trees? And the 
trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign 
over us. But the fig tree said unto them, 
Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good 
fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? 
Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, 
and reign over us. And the vine said unto 
them, Should I leave my new wine, which 
cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted 
over the trees ? Then said all the trees unto 
the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. 
And the bramble said unto the trees, If in 
truth ye anoint me king over you, then come 
and put your trust in my shadow : and if not, let 
fire come out of the bramble, and devour the 
cedars of Lebanon." 

The juniper, which is called a tree, is not 
really a tree, so I make no reference to it. It 
was merely a low bush. Many people believe 
that the Lebanon is a tree, because they have 
so often heard quoted the expression, "the trees 
of Lebanon"; but a careful investigation will 
discover that Lebanon is a mountain, and the 
figure of speech merely refers to the trees that 
grow on this rugged range — "the cedars of 
Lebanon." And some of the descriptions of 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 29 

storms sweeping through the trees of Lebanon 
are among the most vivid descriptions in the 
whole Bible. These occur in the Psalms, and 
no storm descriptions have ever surpassed 
them. 

Amos was called a "trimmer" (or pincher) 
of sycamore trees. It was a profession. It 
was a most humble profession. The "trimmer," 
or "pincher," went about pinching the bark of 
the tree, and a fruit grew from that pinch. It 
was a fruit eaten by the very poor, but never- 
theless had a certain food value. 

A tree had much to do with Jeremiah's call 
to be a prophet. The sight of an almond tree, 
which was the first tree to put out leaves in 
early spring, suggested the care and ever 
kindly presence of Jehovah. He speaks of this 
in the first chapter and eleventh verse : 

"Moreover the word of the Lord came unto 
me, saying, Jeremiah, what seest thou? And 
I said, I see a rod of an almond tree. Then 
said the Lord unto me, Thou hast well seen: 
for I will hasten my word to perform it." 

This undoubtedly made a vivid, a burning 
impression on the great prophet Jeremiah. 

Many times Jeremiah refers to trees to im- 
press his lessons on his hearers "whilst their 
children remember their altars and their 



30 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Asherim by the green trees upon the high 
hills." 

The New Testament Tree Scenes 

All told, there are more than five hundred 
references in the Bible to trees which the 
writer has found. These take the form of 
figures of speech, of great scenes which have 
taken place under trees, of names of the 
various trees of Palestine and Syria, of great 
spiritual teachings and parables. The Old 
Testament is full of such references, but the 
New Testament is not far behind it. 

There is the beautiful story of Jesus and the 
early morning walk and the parable of the fig 
tree. There is the story of the tree up into 
which Zacchaeus, a small man, climbed, that he 
might see over the heads of those who crowded 
about Jesus as he passed ; there is the story of 
Jesus calling Nathanael — "When thou wast 
under the fig tree, I saw thee;" there is the 
story of the little trees in Gethsemane, and at 
last of the tree on which Jesus was slain on 
Calvary. 

It is a striking thing that attracts the atten- 
tion, not only of "the fathers" but also of the 
sons and of the succeeding generations of 
preachers and prophets and authors, that in the 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 31 

opening chapters of Genesis comes that great, 
striking figure of speech, "the tree of life," 
with its vivid story, and also at the very end of 
the Bible, in the last chapter of Revelation, in 
the vision of John, a final reference is made to 
the "tree of life." Thus is the first chapter 
linked with the last, although many centuries 
intervened, an infinite number of things had 
come to pass, and the book had passed through 
innumerable hands : 

"And he showed me a pure river of water of 
life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of tht 
throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst 
of the street of it, and on either side of the 
river, was there the tree of life, which bore 
twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit 
every month: and the leaves of the tree were 
for the healing of the nations." 

Contemporary Literature Uses the Figure 
of Trees for Spiritual Lessons 

It is fascinating to see how from the open- 
ing chapters of the Bible to the last chapter 
the tree is used as a medium of conveying great 
spiritual truths to humanity. It is used by 
poet, prophet, and preacher; it is used in the 
Psalms, in Proverbs, in Job, in the prophecies, 
and in the New Testament. It is frequently 



32 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

used by Jesus. It is also often used by con- 
temporary poets for the purpose of conveying 
spiritual truths. 

I have referred already to perhaps the most 
popular of all poems on the tree, that written 
by the late Joyce Kilmer, who seems to sum up 
all of the spiritual interpretation of the life of 
a tree in his wonderful couplets, ending with 
that memorable phrase of humility in the 
presence of a tree : 

"Poems are made by fools like me, 
But only God can make a tree." 

One can never think of trees and their 
spiritual lessons that one does not think of 

"Winds of the east, winds of the west, 

Wandering to and fro, 
Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs 

That the world of men may know 
That the lordly Pine was the first to come 

And the Pine shall be last to go. 

"Sun, moon, and stars give answer: 

'Shall we not staunchly stand 
Even as now, forever, 

Lords of the last lone land; 
Sentinels of the stillness, 
Wards of the wilder strand ?' " 

{The Spell of the Yukon.) 

Bryant's immortal line, "The groves were 
God's first temples/' and Hood's boyhood 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 33 

memory sweeps us back with a sigH to other, 
sweeter days : 

"I remember, I remember 

The fir trees dark and high; 
I used to think their tender tops 

Were close against the sky. 
It was a childish fancy, 

But it gives me little joy 
To know I'm further off from heaven 

Than when I was a boy." 

Alexander Smith repeats the thought that 
Joyce Kilmer suggests of the trees praying: 

"The trees were gazing up into the sky, 
Their bare arms stretched in prayer for the snows." 

Nor shall one ever cease to hear the music 
of Sidney Lanier's "Little gray leaves that 
were kind to Him/' and "The olive trees" 
which "had a mind to Him/' as "Into the 
woods He went." 

Spiritual Lessons from the Bible 

Lesson L The Good Man Shall Grow Like a 
Mighty Tree 
This spiritual figure of speech runs like the 
sound of sweet music in the treetops all through 
the Book. It is not forgotten and unto the last 
a sweet note of music — the music of hope — is 
played. It sings itself like the sound of a 



34 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

silvery stream beside which "the tree of life" 
grows, bearing its twelve manner of fruits. 
Perhaps the most simple and the most beautiful 
putting of God's promise to the good man is 
that found in Jeremiah, chapter seventeen, 
verses 7, 8 : "Blessed is the man that trusteth 
in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For 
he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and 
that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and 
shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf 
shall be green ; and shall not be careful in the 
year of drought, neither shall cease from yield- 
ing fruit." 

Lesson II. A Tree Is Known by the Emit It 

Yields 

This great spiritual lesson is repeated over 
and over through the Bible. Writer after 
writer uses the figure ; poet after poet since has 
copied the thought — that a tree is known by 
its fruit. If a man is good, he brings forth 
good fruit; if he is bad, he brings forth bad 
fruit. A good heart will blossom and come 
forth to fruitage with love and tenderness anci 
kindly and kingly deeds. A man with evil in 
his heart will give forth hate and hurt and 
heartache and heartbreak in life. Matthew 12. 
33 says, "The tree is known by its fruits." 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 35 

Lesson III. A Tree that Yields No Fruit 
Should Be Cut Down 
This fruit may be the fruit of shade or the 
fruit of food ; but no tree has any right to live 
and absorb moisture and health from the soil 
and not produce. This lesson might be carried 
out into its social implications : the wealthy, who 
live as a burden on society, and who never pro- 
duce, but always live as parasites on social life ; 
the criminal; the selfish. It has tremendous 
social spiritual imports. 

Lesson IV. There Is Hope for Even a Half- 
Dead Tree if It Be Grafted on a New, Tree 
So, in one figure that the Bible uses, an 
almond tree is asked if it does not want to be 
grafted on to the olive tree that it may "enrich 
itself from my fatness/' And so a human life 
that is half dead and fruitless and worthless, 
grafted on the tree of the living Christ, may 
yet live to redeem and refresh the world. In a 
later chapter on Luther Burbank we shall see 
how this great plant-breeder uses this spiritual 
truth. 

Lesson V. "My Beloved Is an Apple Tree" 

We have a friend in the church who 

preached a sermon on this text. His name is 



36 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Huse. He took the words : "As the apple tree 
among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved 
among the sons. I sat down under his shadow 
with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to 
my taste." It is from the Song of Solomon, 
the second chapter and the third verse, and it 
is sweet music and a captivating figure of 
speech. Our friend calls attention to the fact 
of boyhood memories of apple trees. He says, 
"It is a friendly tree." It is like a mother hen. 
It tucks you under the shade of its wings. It 
is like a friendly father. It lets you climb all 
over it. It is like an old family umbrella; it 
shelters everybody. It is beautiful with blos- 
som in the spring when it feeds the bees. It 
is beautiful with fruit in the fall when it feeds 
humanity. It is beautiful with snow in the 
winter ; with snow blossoms and snow flowers. 
It is beautiful with memory all the years when 
its sight has gone from you. Then he calls 
attention to the "Apple Tree Man." He's a 
good kind to marry. He's a good kind for a 
preacher. He's a good kind for a city man- 
ager. He's a good kind for a husband. 

Tree Friends 

I remember an old early harvest apple tree 
in an orchard of boyhood days ; I remember an 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 37 

oak that grew at the top of the old Indian 
mound. I remember a beech, with white, 
smooth bark that we used to cut our initials in 
of a summer afternoon when time was all gold 
and silver and we had plenty of it. I remember 
an old willow tree that overhung the "Old 
Sheep Hole." I remember a giant pine that 
used to swing and sway in winter winds 
against the walls of the house where as a boy 
I slept. I remember that wild, brilliant crim- 
son blanketed Flame of the Forest of the tropic 
lands ; it burned its beauteous way into my soul 
forever. I cannot forget the graceful, singing, 
swinging, swaying, slender grace of the bam- 
boo on many a tropical stream; born in the 
springtime, matured by midsummer, more like 
a flower than a tree. Nor shall anyone be so 
dead of soul as to forget the coconut palm in its 
myriad fruitful, bounteous, beautiful varieties 
throughout the Orient. I remember, and shall 
always remember, a pepper tree in San Jose. 
I have awakened at night and have seen this 
pepper tree swinging in the moonlit winds its 
leaves like dancing fairies. I have seen it 
dripping with rains. I have seen a song spar- 
row take a bath in its leaves by sitting on a 
tiny limb and shaking the water from the limb 
above — an improvised shower bath. I have 



38 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

seen it when it was glinting in the sunlight. I 
have seen it with the street light shining on it. 
I have seen it when, at evening time, it looked 
like a Christmas tree. I have seen it swayed 
to the ground under winter winds and I have 
seen it when the winds before the dawn whis- 
pered sweetly to its myriad leaves. I have seen 
it when the winds of twilight were no less 
gentle with it than the fading light itself. 

I have seen the giant Eucalyptus swaying 
and swinging and creaking in the winds of 
winter, storm-tossed but staunch. I have seen 
trees when they made me lift my shoulders a 
bit straighter; when they made me feel more 
like a man as I watched them battle with the 
storms. 

I have seen the old Cedars of Lebanon on the 
coasts near Monterey, when I took off my hat 
to them for their century-old battle with the 
storms from the sea. I have seen them when 
they had bent their sturdy backs so low 
that their breasts were pressed to the ground, 
but in the battle with the winds their feet were 
planted like a giant's feet to fight, fight, fight 
the storms that would break them. I have seen 
the lonely pines far up the mountain sides at the 
edge of cultivation and the timber lines fight- 
ing the last battles against the heights. I have 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 39 

seen old redwoods, fallen a thousand years, still 
hard in their hearts and firm because they had 
lived well their lives. I have seen giant 
Sequoias — the Sphinx of the living world, a 
Sphinx that was a sturdy giant when Christ 
walked the earth ; I have seen them shake their 
shaggy heads defiantly in the winds and storm 
like some old bear of the forests. 

I have been moved to awe and wonder at 
these gigantic hosts of trees. Some of them I 
have known intimately; some of them I have 
known from afar. Some of them have made 
me lift my soul toward the stars and have made 
me look into the very eyes of God himself. I 
have looked on a New England hillside in fall 
time when the leaves of the -trees were like a 
great Oriental tapestry, myriad-hued with 
crimson, gold, yellow, brown, blue, white; and 
such beauty as would fill a soul with silent 
weeping. 

I have heard trees sing an eternal song of 
beauty and wonder. I have seen them turned 
into great iEolian harps by winter and spring 
and summer winds. I have had my soul stirred 
to its depths by the sweet music that the wind 
makes in many trees; a music like the surf 
song; a music like a harp soughing and sing- 
ing. 



40 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

And this stirring of the soul has been 
deepened by these tree beauties, but never is it 
so stirred as when one looks back through the 
dim centuries and the hope-laden years, down 
through the nights and days, the twilights and 
dawns of twenty centuries to a lonely, crude, 
rough tree, hewn hurriedly, shot into a hole in 
the ground, and a Saviour — my Saviour, the 
world's Saviour — nailed to its rough bark and 
its gaunt form. That tree of all trees is the 
wonder tree of the world. 

With the reverence of a tree 
Lifting up its heart to Thee 
As the evening shadows fall, 
Let me lift my heart in all 
The adoration of a prayer 
For Thy goodness everywhere. 

With the staunchness of a tree 

Let me live so close to Thee 

I may feel when night winds blow, 

With their whispers soft and low, 

Thou art talking tenderly, 

Like a father unto me. 

With the sureness of a tree 
Let me live my life in Thee ; 
Send my roots into Thy heart; 
Of Thy very self a part ; 
Feel Thy strength pour into me 
Like the currents of the sea. 



THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 41 

With the calmness of a tree 
Let me rest content with Thee. 
In Thy rest may I find rest 
As the sun sinks in the west; 
In Thy wisdom may I know 
It is best for me to grow. 



CHAPTER II 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 

THE black clouds hide the sky in hate; 
the waves in anger roll and beat their 
mighty bulk against the crouching, 
rocky shore. They reach their clutching arms 
to drag to death, and down, down into the 
depths they mercilessly draw and drown the 
helpless human victims of the storm. 

The tempest beats and fear is on the sea. 
The seagulls hide their heads among the lofty 
cliffs, so far above the plunging waves that 
they rest in peace. The tempest beats and 
terror seizes on a mother's heart, for loved ones 
range that boiling, roaring sea. The child is 
filled with terror too, but finds a haven behind 
its mother's skirts, just as the seagull finds a 
haven of rest behind the sheltering rocks above 
the storm. 

The tempest beats; the gulls are safe; the 
child has found a haven that drives its fear 
away; but the mother ever has and ever still 
shall face the storms of life and bear the brunt 
of suffering, and go alone down into valleys 
where no other one can go. But ever she may 

42 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 43 

hide behind the robes of God, the Lover of all 
brave, true hearts who fight alone; and ever 
she may mount on wings of love to hide her 
soul amid the rocks of solitude where she may 
brood the breed that have Eternity forever in 
their hearts. 

The far horizons of the deep are brooding 
promises of storms to be. A flash of lightning, 
far and low, and all pervasive, the lightning 
from a storm onrushing, moving like the 
mighty horsemen of the Apocalypse upon the 
ocean's vast expanse — horsemen winged to 
range the seas, who leave a path of pestilence 
along their wake. 

Little house beside the sea; 
Little mother fearfully; 
Little child upon your breast; 
Rest, O rest thy soul in me ! 
I will comfort ; I will keep : 
I will guide and I will guard 
Sailors tossing on the deep; 
Bring them safely back to thee ! 

One quotation that comes to mind is that 
wonderfully comforting thought from Mrs. 
Browning : 

And I smiled to think His greatness 

Flowed around my incompleteness; 

'Round my restlessness, His rest ! 

And the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west. 



44 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Some of the truly great scenes of the Bible 
are scenes connected with storms. The fury 
of a storm always has subdued men of every 
age and every nation and every clime. There 
is something about a storm that makes man feel 
his helplessness and his littleness; it displays 
the strength of something outside of his con- 
trol — the power that sweeps him away as if he 
too like a mighty ship at sea amid the turbulent 
typhoon were a chip of wood or a piece of straw. 

There is never a year that somewhere in 
the Middle West we do not see the strange 
power of a storm manifested. I might draw 
innumerable illustrations from the past, but I 
speak only of a recent storm. It was in a 
Middle- West town. Eyewitnesses tell of 
various things that they saw, and all are fas- 
cinating. They tell how, as they stood on the 
platform of a little station, they saw black 
clouds suddenly sweep over the sky; saw a 
funnel-shaped cloud approaching the city, and 
then heard a strange roar coming upon them. 
They tell how this roar increased in volume as 
the light faded and that when its maximum was 
reached the entire town was in complete dark- 
ness. 

They tell of what they found after the storm 
had passed. Huge box cars had been lifted up 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 45 

by the storm as if they had been part of a 
child's toy train and carried for several blocks. 
A whole train, including the engine, was raised 
bodily from the track. They tell of houses 
being detached from their foundations, carried 
a mile, and deposited on another lot intact. 
Men and women sleeping in their beds were 
picked up and carried several blocks and 
dropped down without injury. 

We are all familiar with the sense of awe 
and power that is manifested in a storm. One 
needs but to read a Hugo's story of the loosed 
cannon on the deck of the storm battered ship, 
or a Conrad's "The Typhoon," to catch the awe 
and terror of storms at sea. I have a childhood 
memory of a cyclone. I can remember the dark- 
ness that settled over the earth. I can remember 
my father quickly taking me up in his arms 
and running with me. I can remember a wild 
ride in a wagon and a hurried climbing down 
into a cyclone-cellar in Kansas. After that all 
I remember is the sense of danger and the 
ominous atmosphere that hovered over all of 
us. I can remember the darkness and the deso- 
lation. 

And where is one who having experienced 
a storm at sea does not remember it, or one 
who has not been impressed with descriptions 



46 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

of ocean storms in literature? Anyone who 
has passed through a real storm at sea will 
never forget it. He will never forget the roll- 
ing and creaking of the ship, whether that ship 
were large or small. It matters not to Old 
Ocean how large ships are, or how well they 
are built, or how strong they are. It is all the 
same to the raging sea. She claps her huge 
hands, raises her great wave arms aloft like a- 
mighty giantess, and the great water walls 
close about the trembling vessel, fall upon it, 
chaos envelops it, and it is crushed as if it 
were an egg-shell. Or a storm might be 
likened to a madman bound with chains, who 
in his maniacal rage rises and breaks those 
chains as if they were made of straw, and 
shouts and mockingly laughs at those who 
think they would bind him. Or, again, the 
storm may display the irresistible force of the 
runaway street car which swept down a street 
in San Francisco. It ran into an automobile 
and crushed it aside as if it had been a play- 
thing ; then into another automobile it crashed, 
dealing with it similarly. Next it collided with 
a big army truck, crushing it, hurling it out of 
its way and killing several people. All of the 
frantic efforts of the motorman and the con- 
ductor to end its mad race were unavailing. It 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 47 

swept on and on, smashing and crushing every- 
thing in its path, reducing its speed but the 
fraction of a second when it struck the big 
army truck. On it drove, plunging, crashing, 
dashing on its way. Nor did it end its wild 
journey until it had reached the foot of the hill, 
where, battered and bruised, it stopped of its 
own accord. So is a storm. 

Man has boasted of the fact that he has con- 
quered nature. He tells how he has harnessed 
the mountain streams, how he has conquered 
the air; how he has taken Niagara and made 
it the servant of his will, made it to run his 
street cars and light his cities. He boasts that 
he has in recent days even bridged the Atlantic 
with his airships and his dirigibles. He shouts 
with triumph over the fact that he has climbed 
more than thirty thousand feet into the air. 
He boasts of his big gun that shoots twenty-five 
miles upward — until its shell is almost outside 
of the earth's atmosphere. He boasts that he 
has photographed the sun and mapped the 
earth and surveyed the universe ; and yet when 
a storm sweeps over the sea it plays with man's 
dirigibles and his planes as if they were thistle- 
down ; and it toys with his great Leviathans as 
if they were frail barks of shingled wood ; and 
it laughs to itself at man's puny efforts to 



48 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

harness nature. The storm is verily that 
"strong life that never knows harness." 

But "men may come and men may go;" 
great engineers may come and great engineers 
may go. They build Panama Canals, they 
build railroads through mighty Alaska's ice- 
bound regions with marvelous conquering 
power of mind and brawn. One of the most 
marvelous miracles of construction that I have 
ever heard about is that of the building of the 
Alaska and Northern Railroad. It was built 
for forty miles inland from Fairbanks. It was 
built in a land where the weather never got 
higher than thirty degrees below zero and 
where the snow was always twenty-five to 
thirty feet deep. In the first forty miles there 
are sixty-seven bridges. 

These same engineers even spanned a 
glacier — Miles Glacier, in the Copper River 
Railroad. The bridge that spanned this huge 
glacier had to be fifteen hundred feet long. 
There is a double turn in the river here and it 
flows between the faces of two glaciers, the 
Miles and the Childs Glaciers, both of them 
"living" glaciers, a sheer three hundred feet 
high in their mighty bulks. Each spring the 
engineers knew that thousands of icebergs 
would come battering down that river from the 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 49 

glaciers and that their buttresses must with- 
stand all of this. They had to erect a bridge 
with four spans. 

Two years they worked under the most diffi- 
cult of zero weather conditions, with blizzards 
blowing practically every minute of the time 
they toiled. Great concrete piers were driven 
fifty feet through the river bottom and 
anchored. To these were added a row of 
eighty-pound rails, set a foot apart all around 
and the whole structure bound with concrete, 
and above this great ice breakers were simi- 
larly constructed. They knew before they 
began the work that it would have to be done 
in the wintertime, because of the fact that as 
soon as the spring thaw began no false work 
could stand against the tremendous pressure 
of the icebergs that were continually breaking 
loose from the glaciers and sweeping down, 
borne forward by a twelve-mile-an-hour cur- 
rent. 

Hence the task of constructing the piers had 
to be undertaken in the dead of winter. It was 
bitter cold. Snow storms were continuous. 
The piercing wind blew sixty to ninety miles an 
hour and hurled the fine particles of snow into 
the faces of the workmen like stones and 
needles. 



50 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

When the last span was almost in place there 
came an appalling moment. The false work, 
which consisted of two thousand piles driven 
forty feet into the bottom of the river, moved 
suddenly fifteen inches. The ice — a solid sheet 
— was borne on a twelve-mile current. Into 
this ice the piles had been frozen solidly as a 
rock. The spring break up had begun. The 
ice cap lifted twenty feet above its winter bed 
and began to move. 

The false work was fifteen inches out of 
plumb. Not to get it back meant that they 
could not connect with the farther shore. The 
engineers realized that at any minute the whole 
thing would go out. The fight that was before 
them they fully realized, but they started to 
work. As the man who described this says: 

"The scene which follows was like a great 
moving picture. I wish that it might have 
been filmed for posterity to see. 

"Steam from every available engine was 
turned on the ice from long pipes. Every man 
in camp was set to work to cut away that seven- 
foot thick layer of ice from the false work. At 
last this was done. 

"During that awful arctic day the men 
worked eighteen hours without stopping. The 
river rose twenty-one feet. But all during this 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 51 

time with the steam pipes working on the ice 
and the men cutting, the piles were kept free 
while one hundred cross-pieces were unbolted. 

"Then the shifting of that false work back 
to plumb was begun. It was done inch by 
inch. At first it was one inch a day. Then it 
was two inches a day. Then three, and then 
four inches a day. The melting and chopping 
went on day and night during this time. One 
minute's relaxing of vigilance would have 
meant defeat. Anchorages were made up the, 
river in the ice to hold the false structure in 
place while every man from the engineers 
down went to work to finish that last four 
hundred and fifty-foot span. Finally at mid- 
night that great crowd of American workers 
and engineers had the satisfaction of seeing 
that great, last span settle down into its con- 
crete bed to stay forever. The last bolt was 
driven at midnight. One hour later the river 
broke loose. In two seconds every pile of the 
false structure was broken ofif from its forty- 
foot bed and the whole thing was a mass of 
twisted wood and wire and steel. But the river 
had been vanquished. It had lost the fight by 
a single hour !" 

I have seldom read or heard of such a 
triumph of man over the forces of nature, not 



52 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

even in the story of the Panama Canal; but 
even as I read this story I am remembering 
that man's ships and his airplanes and his 
dirigibles are still but the playthings of the 
storms. Man may conquer ice and river and 
waterfall, and he may connect ocean with ocean 
by his mighty canal, severing a continent, and 
in that severing connecting a world, defying 
sands and leveling mountains; but when he 
faces a storm, with all his engineering genius 
and with all his mighty power, he is helpless — 
and he knows it. 

And so it shall ever be with man. God lets 
him go just so far, and God wants him to go 
[just so far. But God is still Master. There is 
only one instance on record when a storm was 
quieted, and that was on the Sea of Galilee, and 
there was a group of disciples in the boat with 
Jesus when the storm arose and the waves beat 
so high that it frightened those who were with 
him, and he arose and "rebuked the waves" 
and subdued the storm. And men, wondering, 
said, "What manner of man is this, that even 
the winds and the sea obey him?" 

Old Testament Storms 

The Old Testament writers used the storms 
as they used the birds and rivers and moun- 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 53 

tains and deserts of the Bible to make vivid 
and clear and emphatic their teachings. Some 
of the most marvelous descriptions of storms 
that are written anywhere on earth are the 
descriptions of storms that are found in the 
drama of Job and in the Psalms. 

Psalm 29 is perhaps the most perfect picture 
of a great storm that ever was written. One 
sees an Oriental tempest in all of its fury and 
all of its glory. You see it from the beginning 
to the end. You can see the black clouds and 
the lightning, and hear the roll of thunder. 
You can see the winds sweep through the forest 
of trees and watch them toppling before the 
mighty winds. 

I was in the great redwood forests a while 
ago up in Humboldt County, California, and 
there I saw giant redwoods by the hundreds 
lying crossing each other, toppled over against 
each other like men lying on a battlefield, with 
their huge forms broken, twisted, defeated. I 
was horrified at the sight. They were such 
magnificent giants. They had stood for thou- 
sands of years. It did not seem any more 
possible for one of them to be blown over than 
that Yosemite's El Capitan should go down in 
a storm. But there they were — fallen giants. 

I said, "What did it?" 



54 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

The reply was, "The storms of last winter." 

Then I remembered the storm in this great 
psalm, how it made the trees of Lebanon and 
Hermon shake and tremble. One even sees the 
poor animals of the forests terrorized and flee- 
ing for safety, trembling for their young. 

"Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto 
the Lord glory and strength. 

"Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his 
name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holi- 
ness. 

"The voice of the Lord is upon the waters 
[storm]: the God of glory thunder eth: the 
Lord is upon many waters. 

"The voice of the Lord is powerful; the 
yoice of the Lord is full of majesty. 

"The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars 
[winds] ; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of 
Lebanon. 

"The voice of the Lord divideth the flames 
of fire [lightning]. 

"The voice of the Lord shaketh [thunder] 
the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilder- 
ness of Kadesh. 

"The voice of the Lord sitteth upon the 
flood; vea, the Lord sitteth King forever." 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 55 

But even in this great and marvelous descrip- 
tion the poet is not picturing the storm just for 
the sake of picturing a storm, but he is painting 
this vivid picture with a great purpose. It is to 
show that God reigns even above that mighty 
storm; that God is still Master even of this 
mighty force; that God is not fearful; that he 
is the Maker of the winds and the storms, and 
that they obey his will. Just as in the storm on 
the sea when he permitted his Son Jesus to 
show the world that he was Master of the 
storms, so all through this scene of a storm the 
voice of the psalmist cries that "The Voice of 
the Lord" was over it all. This sentence is 
repeated from time to time with an insistency 
that makes us know that David meant this 
storm description for no other reason than to 
make the great truth sink home to human 
hearts that this was God's storm. 

As one writer says, the first two verses of this 
storm psalm and the last two verses are framed 
to inclose the picture of the storm. They speak 
of peace and quiet. It is a teaching that God 
will bring peace and quiet into human hearts 
after the storms of life have buffeted human 
lives about. And who that has known of this 
stirring, soul-satisfying and everlasting hope 
has not found it blessedly true ? 



56 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Elijah's Storm and Its Teaching 

We used to call it "Elijah's storm" when I 
was a boy. That was the way a class of 
Sunday-school boys thought of it. Somehow 
one teacher with an imagination had made that 
one great story and storm real to us. We could 
see the strong wind that rent the mountains. 
We could feel the earthquake that followed it. 
We could see the fire that swept over the land 
following the storm and earthquake. We often 
decided during the discussions that always fol- 
lowed this story that lightning which came 
during the storm had started the fire that 
Elijah saw from the mouth of the cave where 
he had sought shelter. Then when the San 
Francisco earthquake startled the world, with 
the awful fire that followed it, a boy's interpre- 
tation of this story would give him a right to 
believe that his biblical interpretation was 
right. 

In fact, this whole section of Kings is full of 
storms. There are few varieties of storm that 
are left out. First, there is in the eighth chap- 
ter, toward the close, that fascinating contest 
to see if Baal or Jehovah will answer and the 
final culmination in "the sound of abundance 
of rain." 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 57 

Then Elijah went to the top of Mount Carmel 
and watched the skies and saw the cloud that 
was "no larger than a man's hand" and which 
grew and grew in size until it covered the 
heavens, and "It came to pass in the mean- 
while, that the heaven was black with clouds 
and wind, and there was a great rain." But 
what more vivid description of storm succeed- 
ing storm — storm of the clouds, and then storm 
of the earth, and then storm of fire — than that 
seen by Elijah from the mouth of the cave? — 
"And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great 
and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake 
in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the 
Lord was not in the wind : and after the wind 
an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the 
earthquake : and after the earthquake a fire ; but 
the Lord was not in the fire : and after the fire 
a still small voice." 

And what was the spiritual lesson that God 
was trying to teach through this vivid storm 
description, these startling figures of speech? 
God was trying to teach the great truth that 
ofttimes he has to subdue people with storms 
of anguish and suffering, and even of death, 
before they will be quiet in their souls and listen 
to him. There is no preacher who has not 
learned that folks are always more susceptible 



58 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

to spiritual things after the storm of death has 
passed. It is not that they are scared. It is 
that they have stopped to think. This life is so 
full of a "number of things" that we do not 
pause to think. When we do we see things 
clearly, we get in touch with the infinite things 
and the infinite spiritual powers that are every- 
where about us for our use. 

All of this series of storm scenes was but to 
lead up to the "still small voice." When the 
architect of the Fine Arts Palace designed the 
colonnades he designed them with a purpose, 
and that purpose was to subdue the people 
before they entered the sacred halls of high art. 
They had been in the great palaces of 
machinery and along the avenues where pop- 
corn and ice-cream cones were cried. They 
had watched the airship loop the loop. They 
were in no mood to see beautiful pictures, so 
he built the colonnades, like some ancient 
Grecian scene of beauty. Everybody had to 
pass through these colonnades to get to the pic- 
tures. Before they were through they were 
subdued. And so God used the storm to subdue 
Elijah before he spoke to him. When Elijah 
had been brought to his knees by the power and 
the wonder, then God spoke in a still small 
voice. 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 59 

Yes, and God wanted to teach the great 
spiritual truth that he does not always speak 
through the tumbling, turbulent rivers and 
brooks, but often through the great easy-flow- 
ing, smooth-running, quietly going streams. 
God doesn't make much noise when he talks 
the eternal truths. It is nearly always in "the 
still small voice." But, whatever the lesson, it 
is perfectly clear that God was talking through 
a storm, and it is perfectly clear that Elijah, 
the great prophet, wanted to pass the truth on 
through that medium of speech to humanity 
everywhere. 

Job's Storm 

Job's storm was a whirlwind: "Then the 
Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind." 

And those who know the great drama of Job 
know that no stage setting save that of a storm 
would have been complete after all this play of 
dialogue and words and great fundamental 
human passions and hopes and triumphs. 

The great drama was drawing to its close. 
The climax was near. The acute human prob- 
lems of Job were evidently impossible of solu- 
tion. But still Job trusted in his God, and still 
he cried out, "Though he slay me, yet will I 
trust him." 



60 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

"The undying fire" was still smoldering in 
Job's breast. The arguments seemed to be all 
against him. He seemed defeated by his fault- 
finding friends. The preponderance of evi- 
dence seemed to weigh him down, but still he 
trusted. Then God's voice came to him in the 
whirlwind, and it spoke peace to his troubled 
soul. 

Dr. Knudson says, "Job's problems were 
never solved; they just disappeared as God 
spoke out of the whirlwind." And that is often 
the way of life, and no doubt God meant to 
teach this in his great drama. Our problems 
are not always solved by us, or for us, but they 
disappear, which is just as well for us and for 
the world. The thing is pragmatic. It works. 
They disappear. The thing works. God makes 
our sorrows to dissipate. They are no more. 
He speaks to us out of the whirlwinds of our 
passions, our hates, our jealousies, our suffer- 
ings, our weaknesses, our fits of anger, our 
hopelessness, and somehow his voice makes 
everything right. It is like hearing the voice 
of love in the night. 

A little girl imagines all sorts of goblins and 

bugaboos and strange monsters in the night 

hours. Her little imagination can people a 

) sleeping-porch with more wild animals than the 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 61 

Zoo of New York ever owned. She can crowd 
them all into a ten-foot sleeping porch. She 
can, with her imagination at night, see more 
beasts with big teeth and horns walk up the 
gang plank of half-sleep and in through an 
open window than walked into the ark before 
the flood. She can see more strange ghosts 
and weird creatures than a Kipling's or a Poe's 
imagination working at top speed for a lifetime 
can conjure up. Her little voice will cry out in 
terror, startling a sleeping daddy and mother 
near at hand, who are lying utterly unconscious 
of all the danger they are in, utterly uncon- 
scious of the hordes of dreadful beasts that are 
pouring into that sleeping porch, making the 
night hideous with their snarls and their growl- 
ings and their gnashing of teeth, until they 
hear a little terrified voice, crying, "Daddy, 
daddy ! Mother, mother !" 

The daddy sits up in bed a bit startled him- 
self, and hears of the wild animals that are on 
the porch, and he speaks a quiet word of love 
and encouragement to a troubled little soul; 
and in a flash the daddy's voice drives all the 
wild animals away for good. They disappear 
as if his voice were a magic wand. They slink 
away to their lairs without harming the little 
girl ; and all is peace and quiet, and a little child 



62 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

dreams in peace and a little heart is stilled of 
its fear. Just a daddy's voice dissipates the 
fear and the troubles go away ; and the problem 
is solved. And so out of the whirlwind God's 
voice spoke peace to Job's troubled soul. 

Other Storm Figures 

There is that beautiful, confidence-produc- 
ing, cheering word of David the poet to us, and 
we hear him sing a new hope that God "maketh 
the storm a calm." And so hereafter, when our 
hearts are torn with the storm of anger, fear, 
jealousy, let God make of our storm a calm. 

Proverbs warns us that "fear cometh as a 
storm." 

And we know that it does. Sometimes fear 
will sweep over us like the chilly blasts before 
a winter storm and it will leave us helpless. 
Those of us who dealt with many people and 
many homes during the influenza epidemic will 
remember that fear made hundreds of people 
more susceptible to the disease that was stalk- 
ing like a black specter in our midst. "Fear 
Kills More Folks Than Flu" was the theme of 
a sermon that the writer preached at that time, 
trying to show that the worst disease-breeding 
ground in the world was a soul filled with fear. 
God never meant for his children to be afraid. 



STORMS OF THE BIBLE 63 

"Let not your hearts be troubled" is a message 
that he sends us a hundred times in his Book. 

But if fear does come "like a storm," he 
assures us through Isaiah that there is in 
Jehovah "A covert from the storm," and in 
another part of Isaiah he says it in other 
words — "a refuge from the storm." 

Jehovah makes it clear in many a figure of 
speech through the vehicle of a storm that he 
will punish sin and sinning nations (particu- 
larly sinning nations) with a storm; that he 
will sweep them away as with a tempest. 
Typical of all of these many figures so used is 
that of Isaiah, chapter twenty-nine, verse six: 
"Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with 
thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, 
with storm and tempest, and the flame of a 
devouring fire." And whoever believes that 
this does not happen needs but to try the way 
of sin. 

I know of a home now where sin has entered. 
And because I know that, I can make a 
prophecy which will be fulfilled within my own 
day that the one who is guilty of the sin will 
suffer grievously before the story has come to 
its last chapter. In the last chapter, like Tito 
of Romola, there will be a pair of bony fingers 
clutching at a sleek, fat throat and a lifeless 



64 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

body and a lifeless, burned-out soul will lie on 
the banks of the Arno river to be the food of 
vultures. That's why God says that sinning 
men and sinning cities will look as if a storm of 
earthquake and fire has swept over them. This 
figure is used frequently, but it is everlastingly 
true. 

Did you see San Francisco after the fire and 
earthquake? Did you see Galveston after the 
tidal wave? Did you see Chicago after the 
fire? Did you see Baltimore after the great 
fire ? Did you see Constantinople after fire had 
swept it almost from the face of the earth ? Did 
you see France after the war? That's what a 
human soul looks like after sin has burned its 
soul away. Sin leaves a human being looking 
like the burned, dried, charred flesh of one who 
has met death in a flame of fire. That's what 
sin does to a soul and to a nation. 

But in the same book of Isaiah, in the twenty- 
fifth chapter, God also promises his nation and 
his people and every human soul that will come 
to him that he will be a stronghold to them: 
"For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a 
strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge 
from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when 
the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm 
against the wall." 



CHAPTER III 
THE MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 

NO wonder that the writers of the Bible 
— and, indeed, writers the world over 
and the centuries through — have 
used the mountains as some of their most tell- 
ing and striking figures of speech. 

What thing about us is so stable, so reliable, 
so eternal as the mountains, the "mothers of 
rivers" ? The similes that are commonly used 
by preachers and writers with mountains as the 
comparison are enough to fill a page of this 
chapter, and every one of them will be found in 
the Bible. They are : 

As high as the mountains. 

As majestic as the mountains. 

As staunch as the mountains. 

As reliable as the mountains. 

As everlasting as the mountains. 

As stable as the mountains. 

As true as the mountains. 

As near to God as the mountains. 

As godlike as the mountains. 

As abundant as the mountains. 

65 



66 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

As rugged as the mountains. 

As steep as the mountains. 

As fertile as the mountains. 

As friendly as the mountains. 

As life-giving as the mountains. 

As faithful as the mountains. 

And so it goes. Figures of speech to teach 
great spiritual truths with the mountains as 
backgrounds are common in the Bible; common 
in the sense of occurring frequently, but 
wonderfully uncommon in their beauty and 
depth of meaning. 

"The lonely sunsets flare forlorn 

Down valleys dreadly desolate; 
The mighty mountains soar in scorn, 
As still as death, as stern a9 fate! 

"The lonely sunsets flame and die; 
The giant valleys gulp the night; 
The monster mountains scrape the sky; 
The eager stars are diamond bright." 

(The Spell of the Yukon.) 

What a thrilling sight it is to see God put the 
mountains to sleep at night! Watch him 
spread, first, a glorious crimson blanket over 
them, and then over this crimson blanket a 
purple robe as befits the slumbers of a king. 
Then often, when God thinks the mountains 
will be too chilly, in between the royal robe of 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 67 

purple and the crimson blanket he slips a lighter 
robe of pink and salmon color. Then when he 
has the little hills, and the great old pines, and 
the tiny bushes, and the flowers and grasses, 
and the birds in their nests, and the myriad 
baby leaves tucked in for the night, God sings 
them to sleep with his running streams and his 
winds whispering in the leaves, and soughing 
through the valleys. And as you watch this 
gentle putting of the mountains to sleep, you 
cannot tell which is the more beautiful, tender- 
ness of the God of the mountains and of the 
little hills or the twilight hills themselves. It is 
a wonderful privilege to watch the mountains 
put to bed at twilight. 

And then to see God awaken the mountains 
is no small privilege. First he sends the winds 
before the dawn and with them the heralds of 
faint light that tell of the coming of the groom 
of the morning. It is as though God would 
awaken the mountains as gently as he put them 
to sleep. Nature is gentle at times. It is as a 
mother who awakens her child. She does not 
go into the room yelling and clamoring, and 
shouting to awaken the child. She does not 
discharge a gun nor drop a book. She does not 
want to awaken it too abruptly. She is sweetly 
gentle about it, and whispers its name like a 



68 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

morning prayer : "Betty — Betty — Baby dear — 
has mother got a baby here?" And so God 
awakens the mountains and the grasses and the 
little hills — so gently: first, the winds before 
the dawn — and how softly they blow! — so 
softly that were you awake you could barely 
feel them on your cheeks. But it is a stirring 
wind; this wind before the dawn, and the 
mountain begins to awake to consciousness. 
Then God sends with sudden wondrous har- 
mony a chorus of bird songs, louder than the 
wind before the dawn, and with it a soft mantle 
of light across the eastern hills. He has now 
touched the cheeks of the sleeping mountains 
and is shaking his children gently. The trees 
begin to sway in the wind, and a pale light slips 
in through the windows of the sky. 

And now, quietly, unobtrusively — almost 
before we know it, the dawn has come, and the 
bird chorus has swelled to fullest volume. The 
winds are sweeping through the pines, the 
mountains are shouting with joy at a new day, 
and God is glad. His children are awake and 
ready to be fed, and ready for work, and ready 
for play. 

Poets and artists and prophets have always 
loved the mountains. Jesus Christ, the greatest 
Poet and Artist and Prophet of all times, found 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 69 

a place to rest and pray high up on the moun- 
tains of Judaea. 

Bret Harte was a lover of his Rocky ]\' 1 \ 
tains and Joaquin Miller sings his "Songs of 
the Sierras" with a love and charm that makes 
them our mountains also. Whittier loved the 
White Mountains of New England, while 
Irving lived among and immortalized the roll- 
ing mountain side of the beautiful Selkirks. 
Angelo saw his first visions of marble glories 
as he gloried in the far-off beauties of the 
majestic Alps, and Robert Service has sung us 
the songs of Alaskan peaks and glaciers. John 
Muir makes us live with him on old White 
Shasta's snow-blanketed slopes, or roam with 
him Yosemite's precipitous sides, or scale her 
El Capitan and her Half Domes, or journey 
with him up Ranier's ice-bound pathways. And 
we of lesser fame have our mountains and love 
them. 

I wandered as a boy over the Allegheny 
Mountains, and sang as a boy that song which 
thrills all men born in that State whose motto 
is "Mountaineers are always free," the beauti- 
ful melody of "Those West Virginia Hills." 
But in recent years mine has been the glory of 
having as boon companion the Sierras; mine 
has been the glory of living within sight and 



70 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

sound of Mount Shasta, "The noblest Roman 
of them all." I have watched Mount Shasta 
belch its streams of crystal snow-born water 
out across the valleys of California, I have 
heard its thundering avalanches and have 
watched the slow creeping of its glaciers. I 
have seen it fling its snow-banners to the winds 
of winter and I have seen it through the 
shadows of nighttime. I have watched a 
crimson sunset further glorify its immaculate 
beauty, and I have seen storm clouds scowling 
about its ever-dominant head. I have watched 
it go to sleep at night and awaken in the morn- 
ing. 

The world over men turn their eyes and 
hearts mountainward. One who has traveled 
over the Orient will remember a common sight : 
that of the inevitable "pilgrim" on his way, 
across a whole nation, by foot, begging his 
living, because of a vow he has made that he 
will ascend Fujiyama's beauteous and imposing 
peak. 

Fujiyama looms up in the spiritual life of the 
Japanese just as it rises in its snow-crowned 
symmetry above the otherwise level stretches of 
Japan. To the Japanese this great mountain is 
a thing to revere, a thing to pray to, a thing to 
bow down before, a thing to worship. And 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 71 

even to the casual traveler Fujiyama, rising, 
as it does, from a level expanse, fills one with 
awe and wonderment. 

And just as Fujiyama stands out as one oi 
the great shrines of the Orient so does old 
Mount Taishan, China. Here for thirty cen- 
turies men have been worshiping. Here Con- 
fucius himself climbed six thousand steps to 
Taishan's mile-high crest where the quaint 
temples and towers and monoliths rear their 
heads and send the music of their innumerable 
bells tinkling in the winds. 

Here six thousand granite steps have been 
engineered, so far back in the dim past that the 
Chinese cannot tell who performed this 
gigantic task. Up these six thousand granite 
steps hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every 
year, from all over the great nation, make their 
way with devout hearts, to pay their vows made 
during the years. Mothers come here who 
have made a vow that if they come safely 
through the voyage of birth, they will climb 
Taishan. Business men who have prospered 
during the year climb Taishan to pay their 
yows of gratitude. From its sacred summit one 
may sight the far off ocean beauty with the 
level plains lying in grace and beauty between. 
Taishan is called "the oldest worshiping place 



72 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

on earth." One has a sense of reverence as he 
stands on its wind-swept summit. For long 
before Moses shook the bondage of Egypt 
from his soul, centuries before Isaiah lived and 
dreamed and died ; before Christ was awaited ; 
before Europe had a civilzation at all; before 
America saw its first Indians, men were 
worshiping on Taishan's peaks. 

"I have stood in some mighty mouthed hollow 
Plumb full of hush to the brim; 
I have watched the big husky sun wallow 
In crimson and gold, and grow dim, 
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming 
And the stars tumbled out neck and crop, 
And I thought that I surely was dreaming 
With the peace of the world piled on top." 

{The Spell of the Yukon.) 

And not only do the poets, painters, prophets 
and preachers outside the sacred precincts of 
the Bible love the mountains and use them as 
mediums of thought conveyance, but the Book 
itself is full of mountains. 

Mountains of the Bible 

There are three scientific explanations for 
the origin of mountains, and we find all three 
of these explanations accounting for the moun- 
tains in biblical lands as well as in our own 
great country. The first is mountains by eleva- 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 73 

tion; the second is mountains by erosion; the 
third is mountains by accumulation. Let us 
consider first the theory of origin by elevation: 
Many mountains and many mountain ranges 
owe their origin to upheavals from beneath 
that have come during the geological periods, 
when the forces of underworld nature were, 
like a huge elephant humping its coast-long 
back, bulging the surface of the earth high into 
the air. Thus came our Rocky Mountains and 
our high Sierras ; and if you want a beautiful 
scientific narrative of how this came about, 
with a poetic background, read Edwin Mark- 
ham's California the Wonderful. In addition 
to our Western mountains are the Scandina- 
vian and Grampian ranges, the ranges of 
North Wales, those of Bavaria, and the biblical 
Sinaitic group beween the Gulfs of Suez and 
Akaba. The Alps and the Pyrenees were also 
a part of the world's upheaval. 

The second classification is origin by erosion. 
Many mountains which stand off by them- 
selves, and mountain ranges running for thou- 
sands of miles owe their origin to the erosion 
of the lands around them. This is true of our 
own ranges of the Colorado in North America, 
where by rains and the chisel of the Colorado 
River not only a great mountain range was cut 



74 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

out and the plateaus leveled, but a beautiful 
Grand Canyon was left over in the making. A 
range called the Jura in Switzerland came 
about in this way, as did a range in South 
Wales, 

The mountains in biblical lands — Upper 
Egypt, Edom, Moab, southern Judea — the 
Lebanon range, with the dome-like Mount 
Hermon, which every winter hoards its snows 
to pour into beautiful Galilee — all owe their 
origin to erosion of the tablelands about them, 
leaving these ranges and single lone mountains 
standing out by themselves. Thus came Mount 
Hor where Aaron died. 

The third and last theory is that of mountains 
by accumulation. What a marvelous story the 
story of accumulation tells ! It might be called 
the snowball method. Thousands of cities have 
literally been buried by accumulation. In some 
places we see four and five cities on top of each 
other, which through the succeeding centuries 
have been buried by accumulation. It has 
seemed almost impossible, but we who live close 
neighbors to sand dunes know that it is entirely 
within reason. If you don't believe it, go out 
on the dunes and see how in one sand storm a 
fence and a house will be buried almost over- 
night. 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 75 

But accumulative mountains usually come by 
the eruption of volcanoes, either out of the sea 
or on the land. These belching holes throw out 
millions of tons of debris, which through the 
aeons piles itself up into a mighty mountain. 

The Auvergnes in Central France were 
formed in this manner ; Vesuvius and Etna, two 
great isolated mountains, were formed in this 
accumulative manner. 

In the region east of the Upper Jordan, called 
in the New Testament Trachonitis, there are 
several extinct volcanic cones rising above the 
surface of the plains. Still further east in 
Bashan a grand range of volcanic mountains 
dominates this wild land. In Central Arabia is 
another range thus formed. Not far from the 
famous Mohammedan Mecca and Medina are 
such mountains, although they were probably 
thrown up even before the event of man and the 
story of the flood. 

Biblical References to Mountains 

"A god's mountain," indicating greatness or 
majesty — so Mount Horeb and Sinai were 
called, not only because they were dignified, but 
also because they had biblical chapters of the 
great drama of religion enacted on their high- 
flung peaks that have made them memorable. 



?6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Both 'The Mount of the Congregation" and 
'The Mount of Assembling" refer to the 
dwelling place of the gods and to places where 
the Israelites met to worship. 

Among the figures of speech which appear in 
the Bible in reference to mountains are those in 
which the mountains are said to "cover the 
guilty from God's face," to "leap in praise of 
Jehovah," to "witness his dealings with his 
people," They also are referred to as hiding 
places, hunting and grazing grounds for cattle 
and sheep, and as beacon stations. 

Some of the most memorable and far-reach- 
ing scenes of the Bible were enacted on moun- 
tains. Mount Moriah, a single and lonely 
elevated summit among the hills of Palestine 
was the scene of Abraham's intended sacrifice 
of his son. Here the knife was lifted ; here the 
prayer was uttered; here a father heart was 
tested supremely, and here a lover of God 
triumphed. Mount Sinai is a name to conjure 
with in biblical history and great scenes and 
gigantic moments. Mount Hor, the scene of 
Aaron's death, shall be forever sacred to the 
lover of Holy Writ. The Mount of Olives, over- 
looking Jerusalem the Golden, memorable for 
many incidents of the great story of Christ 
(almost as significant an out-of-doors spot as 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 77 

the shores of blue Galilee), is most memorable 
because it was from this mountain and down 
its sides that Jesus walked on the morning of 
his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. 

The mount of transfiguration is in dispute as 
to its exact location. Most authorities, how- 
ever, agree that it was on Mount Hermon. 
What more appropriate spot for this last great 
scene? There it stands overlooking the Lake 
of Galilee, whose level, as we have seen, each 
spring is raised by pouring its melting snows 
into the basin. What more appropriate spot 
for this great event than that peak, nine 
thousand feet high, which could easily have 
been reached in less than a week from Csesarea 
Philippi ? The greatest enunciations, including 
the Beatitudes, were given on mountains. 
"Mountain-top experiences" has come to be a 
part of the very religious phraseology of our 
belief. 

Truths Taught by the Mountains 

Just as has been the case in every outstand- 
ing feature of natural life, the writers of the 
Bible used the mountains to teach their great 
truths. They recognized the fact first, that 
mountains inspire worship. Fuji-san, the great 
mountain of Japan, which has been mentioned, 



78 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

is the worshiping place of the entire Japanese 
empire. No loyal Japanese ever passes that 
sacred mass of mountain greatness without 
making his reverent obeisance. One Christmas 
Eve, with a group of Methodists I was at Angel 
Island, San Francisco. We were trying to 
make a group of Japanese immigrants, which 
included a group of Geisha girls, happy on that 
evening of all evenings. We showed them sev- 
eral reels of motion pictures, but got no re- 
sponse from them. They were like little brown 
imitations of the Sphinx, as far as any joy on 
their faces showed. Then we showed on the 
screen a picture of Fuji. There was instant 
response. Little peals of joyous laughter came 
from those Geisha girls. There was a sudden 
commotion, and much to our surprise in a 
twinkling they were bowing to their knees 
before that great mountain. 

On the summit of Shasta's peak there is a 
little protected box in which some reverent soul 
has placed a Bible, and here those who worship 
God read a bit of his book, and pray on that 
great summit. 

Bishop Quayle says that they "suggest 
eternity" and he further adds, "Compared with 
Mount Tacoma, the immortal Sphinx is but a 
child in years." 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 79 

Mountains are so high that they seem natu- 
rally to lift us nearer to God, and they also 
take us further away from the sordidness of the 
world, away from the "mud and scum of 
things/' up into the clean air, and the purity 
and sweetness where stars shine and God is. 

Mountains also suggest steadfastness. In 
the midst of this turbulent age, with the world 
full of restlessness and uneasiness, it is good to 
look unto the hills. 

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills :* from 
whence cometh my help." 

The mountains seem to be about the only 
stable, steadfast things on earth, and they give 
us new strength when we live in their midst 
during these restless years. 

I lived within sight of Mount Tamalpais for 
three years in San Francisco. I saw it the first 
thing in the morning and the last thing at night. 
I watched the golden glory of the Golden Gate 
flood its brown sides, and watched the white 
fog of a new morning bathe its rugged outlines. 

I have seen great floods of fog pour in from 
off the Pacific Ocean and completely hide its 
rugged form, but I have never at any time 
doubted that, when the fog rolled away or was 



1 Revised Version, "mountains. 1 



80 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

dissipated by the sun, my old faithful friend 
still would be there. It always was. It was 
steadfast. 

San Francisco was shaken to dust by the 
great earthquake and then the dust went up in 
ashes, but old Tamalpais was undisturbed by 
that terrible calamity. There it stood f aithful, 
steadfast, as a true friend stands by one when 
trouble comes. Such are unmoved. 

So may our friends be ; so may our ideals be ; 
so may our hope in eternity be; so may our 
faith in God be ; so may our belief in good and* 
in Jesus Christ be; so may our loyalty to the 
church be, and our love for our home and our 
loved ones ; so may our belief in things high and 
holy; so may the staunchness of our lives be; 
as steadfast and as faithful as the mountains. 

They suggest many other things: they sug- 
gest abundance, shelter ; they are the "mothers 
of rivers" ; they are the hope of the valleys and 
of humanity ; they are the beacon lights of the 
world ; they are the guideposts of the mariners 
coming in from sea, as Miller says; they are 
the test of all faith; but, more than all other 
things, they suggest steadfastness and worship. 
These two stand out like two great twin peaks 
themselves in a glorious range of mountains, 
these two and none other; these two, snow- 



MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 81 

crowned and gleaming in the sunlight of 
eternity : worship and steadfastness. 

And at last the hope of the world gleams 
from a mountain top, where Calvary's cross 
arises with its form of hope through the cen- 
turies. I have seen Mount Shasta all day long 
through the distance and near at hand, and it 
has been a glorious sight. I have seen Mount 
McGregor, that last resting place of General 
Grant, and one Sunday morning I climbed to 
its peak, and standing on the place where Grant 
used to stand to look out over the valley of the 
beautiful Hudson, we took out our Book of 
books and read the Sermon on the Mount, and 
there we worshiped God. We had climbed to 
the top of Mount McGregor, and in that climb 
we had climbed nearer to God. 

But, higher than all of these, more beautiful, 
more crowned with the light of a great hope, 
more steadfast, from whose breast flow more 
streams of mercy and healing than flow from 
Shasta ; although it is only a mere hill, growing 
sweeter and sweeter each day, growing higher 
and mightier as the centuries roll on, more 
majestic, more filled with an eternal hope, is 
Mount Calvary, on whose lonely top still 
stands in the heart of the world the lonely cross 
of Jesus. 



CHAPTER IV 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 

SINCE the mountains are said to be the 
"mothers of rivers," it is well to con- 
sider in this chapter the rivers of the 
Bible and the great spiritual lessons that the 
biblical writers intended to teach by reference 
to them. Some one has said that all great 
writers have been influenced by three things, 
namely, the epoch in which they lived, their 
race, and their physical surroundings ; and cer- 
tainly among the physical surroundings of the 
Bible the rivers played no small part. Nearly 
every writer at some time tries to picture God 
as speaking through a river, as does Isaiah 
when he says, "I will extend peace to her like 
a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a 
flowing stream" (Isa. 66. 12). This great 
figure of speech that Isaiah uses in trying to 
impress the people with whom he is speaking is 
a natural figure of speech. If there is any one 
thing that to me expresses a sense of quiet and 
peace, it is a great, broad river flowing serenely 
between hills and meadows to its inevitable 
destination, the ocean. 

82 



RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 83 

There is nothing uncertain about a river. It 
knows what it is about, and it knows where it 
is going. It has been there before. It has been 
there almost as often as a motorman has been 
over the route that he has been running for 
years. The drops of water that go to make up 
this great, broad river have traveled this route 
from the beginning of time. Blessed is the man 
who knows where he is going, in whom is no 
uncertainty. 

It is a contented body, a river. It does not 
allow itself to become restless and uncertain 
and disturbed and worried and flustrated. It 
goes serenely on, no matter what happens. If 
a dam gets in its way it quietly seeks an outlet 
along some other route. If a bowlder thrusts 
itself up to impede the progress of a river, that 
river calmly and without much ado or fret, 
laughs to itself — and some say that the splash- 
ing is the way a river has of laughing — and 
slips serenely around that bowlder on its blessed 
and certain way. 

Happy are the men and women who have 
learned the lesson of calmness in their lives; 
who will not allow themselves to be frustrated, 
who will not permit their souls to be disturbed 
and perturbed about anything; who, when 
obstacles arise in life, go around or through 



84 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

those obstacles and, without much ado, continue 
on their journey — smiling. 

Now, an ocean is not a thing of peace. I do 
not think many writers use the ocean as a 
figure of peace. It is too restless for that. 
It is always restless and unsatisfied. It is 
like a great angry Numidian lion imprisoned 
in a cage. It roars and growls, and paws 
against the rugged rock and mountain bars of 
its prison, for the ocean is in prison. True 
enough its prison is a great prison. It is the 
earth. But it is a big ocean and, no matter how 
big a prison is, if the prisoner's body scrapes 
the sides of that prison it is too small a prison 
and the prisoner will fight against its bars. 
Did you ever stand beside the cage of a great 
angry lion, with the question in your mind as 
to what would happen were it to break through 
the bars ? Did you ever stand beside the shores 
of the great ocean with the angry sea roaring 
and dashing itself against the shore line bars, 
and rocks and cliffs, as though striving to be 
released? If you have stood on such a shore, 
you know into what a rage the waves may lash 
themselves. 

And even on a day that is comparatively 
calm this great old ocean is a restless animal. 
It cannot be quiet. It is like a polar bear. Not 



RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 85 

impetuous, but restlessly pacing up and down 
in its cage, coming and going, never ceasing, 
ever walking without a roar of complaint, but 
walking, walking, walking. It is unceasingly 
restless. 

But a river is a thing of peace. It may be 
turbulent in places, and for a few moments, as 
the mountains try to shut it into a narrow 
gorge. Then it becomes restless, but only for 
a minute, and just beyond you will find it 
moving smoothly in the sunlight of wide fields, 
with a great placidity that is most comforting. 

The brook and the creek and the smaller 
mountain streams may shout and laugh and 
romp and play like children let loose from 
school. There is no quiet in them ; they are all 
turbulency and noise and romping, and run- 
ning, dodging around rocks for the mere fun of 
dodging. This brook, tumbling down a moun- 
tainside is the childhood of the river, before it 
has grown up into quieter, more sedate, more 
dignified ways. The brook is the childhood of 
the river — that's all; and childhood is always 
turbulent if it is natural. 

But a river is calm; it is in repose; it is at 
peace with the world and with itself. There- 
fore Isaiah's figure is particularly striking: "I 
will extend peace to her like a river/' 



86 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Born and raised on the Ohio River, one of 
America's rtiost beautiful streams, I feel that I 
too, if I had been writing the book of Isaiah, 
would have used a figure very much like his 
"peace like a river." I have seen the Ohio in 
moods of anger and hate and fury, but that only 
for a short period in the springtime. Two 
thirds of the year it is a great, broad, peaceful 
stream. I have watched it flowing between 
age-old hills and far-stretching meadows, with 
cattle standing in its shallow waters near the 
shore, and a great peace on land and hill and 
river. I have seen it on a midsummer after- 
noon, with the heat shimmering on its surface 
— at peace. I have seen it at night with a great 
moon and myriad stars shimmering through 
the willows, and the water lapping against the 
willow branches — at peace. I have floated on 
its broad breast when a great impenetrable 
bank of fog lay over its surface in the early 
morning, and it was at peace with the world. 
I have seen it by twilight with the sun dropping 
behind the Ohio hills, and peace was there. 

I have followed the beautiful Hudson from 
its source to its mighty mouth. I have 
wandered along its placid shores up yonder 
where Burgoyne surrendered at Schuylerville. 
I have ridden its broad breast from Albany to 



RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 87 

New York, along its historic ways, between its 
magnificent Palisades, within sight of its roll- 
ing mountains which we call the Catskills, 
where memories of Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy 
Hollow and the great gray walls of West Point 
stand out. But, above all, there is a memory, 
and a beautifully comforting and placid 
memory it is, of sweet peace hovering over that 
river. 

I shall never be thrilled again as I was 
thrilled at my first sight of the broad Missis- 
sippi, that river about which lingers the essence 
of the romance of history, that river upon 
whose bosom Mark Twain piloted great, broad 
steamers, that river down which La Salle 
floated, that river the dominant characteristic 
of which is peace. 

The great train sped along the beautiful 
Delaware one Sunday morning as a spring rain 
poured down with pattering insistency upon 
its quietly flowing surface, singing as it fell a 
song of everlasting peace. 

I have stood by that great twenty-foot spring 
of ice-cold crystal snow-water which, after 
melting on old JV^punt Shasta, finds its way by 
an underground passage until it bursts out of 
the earth as the source of the Sacramento 
River. From thence I have followed the turbu- 



88 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

lent, tumbling waters of this great California 
river, through the wide valley that it makes to 
"blossom as the rose" down to its mouth. 

Yonder in France I have lived and I have 
swum in the green waters of the historic 
Marne, the Meuse, and the Loire. Each of 
these rivers, like the Somme, is known to 
history as a body of water on which some of 
the bloodiest battles of all history have been 
fought, but those who know them, and who 
have lived beside them, even in war times, know 
them for quiet, softly flowing streams, the 
motion of which is scarcely perceptible at times, 
flowing through green fields and under the 
white bridges and along the white highways 
of beautiful France. And no sight is more 
peaceful than the valleys of these great French 
rivers in spring, when a million red poppies are 
blowing in the winds and a dozen great 
chateaux loom against white clouds on the 
opposite hillside. No wonder that Jeanne d'Arc 
dreamed a dream and caught her vision as she 
stood in "The Valley of Vision" at Domremy 
overlooking the Meuse. 

I have had for my friends the beautiful, 
quietly flowing Merrimac, the Willamette, the 
Missouri, the Monongahela, the Allegheny, the 
Rio Grande, the Columbia, the Yangtse of 



RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 89 

China, the Sambas of Borneo, the Pasig of 
Luzon, the winding Saigon of French Indo- 
China, and the great, broad breasts of the 
rivers of the ocean, and I have never had any 
feeling other than that of a great sense of peace 
in their presence. "I will extend peace to her 
like a river." 

Rivers of Literature and History 

Somehow rivers have been not only closely 
linked with biblical history and literature, but 
they also have been closely linked with secular 
literature and history. 

One never thinks of Tennyson that he does 
not think of the Thames and Hallam ; these two 
great comrades of "In Memoriam" floating 
down its surface. One does not think of the 
Merrimac that the faces of Whittier, Long- 
fellow, and Thoreau do not come flitting peace- 
fully before one's memory screen. One never 
thinks of the Charles that he cannot see Long- 
fellow and hear the sad tones of "The Bridge," 
when 

". . . only the sorrow of others 
Throws its shadow over me/* 

One cannot refer to the Rhine and the 
Rhone without a myriad scenes — and most 



90 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

significant scenes — of history come thronging 
before him. The Dnieper and the Danube 
bring back similar memories. The Nile, with 
its annual overflow, if it could tell its story of 
the Pharaohs and its subsequent history down 
through the Great War, would tell a thrilling 
tale. 

It was from the Nile that the figure of speech 
suggested in the quotation used in the begin- 
ning of this chapter came. It was a most 
natural thing for the Hebrew writers who were 
familiar with the Nile to talk of a person or a 
nation, which worshiped Jehovah, to have 
"Peace like a river and glory of the nations like 
an overflowing stream/' 

Rivers of the Bible and Lessons Taught 

A figure of speech referring to rivers is used 
one hundred and twenty times in the Old Testa- 
ment. In the New Testament there are seven 
references. 

The rivers mentioned by name in the Old 
Testament are the Tigris, the Nile, the 
Euphrates, the River of Eden, the Gozan, and 
the Cush. The great river of the New Testa- 
ment, of course, is the Jordan. 

The idea of a river is used in the Bible to fix 
boundaries, for bathing, for fishing, as a means 



RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 91 

of defense, as a place of prayer, as a highway 
for navigation, and for irrigation — for every 
single one of which purposes it also is used to 
this day by some people. We bound our States 
by rivers, we erect our bathing pavilions in 
them, and the Columbia River renders unto us 
each year its harvest of beautiful, red-fleshed 
salmon. The Marne has been used for cen- 
turies of European history as a place of defense, 
just as the Rhone and a hundred other rivers. 
As a place of prayer we do not use rivers so 
often, but many of us have seen most sacred 
baptismal services held on the banks of a 
modern river. And even as a "highway for 
navigation" since the war rivers have come 
into more common use. As a means of irriga- 
tion those of us in the great West have seen 
millions of acres of arid, acrid desert land re- 
claimed through the utilization of our rivers. 

Just as the Lake of Galilee is made most 
precious to the Christian heart because it is so 
pregnant with memories of Christ, so the River 
Jordan is just as dear to us because along its 
winding shores so many great scenes in the life 
of our Master took place. 

I have so often thought of how close he clung 
to this river. He never got very far away from 
it. He was baptized and acknowledged as his 



92 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Father's Son on its banks, and from its waters 
he went into the wilderness to fast and pray. 
Mount Hermon and the River Jordan and the 
Lake of Galilee are close together. They are 
linked to each other by the Jordan, the moun- 
tain and the sea, and they are even more closely 
linked by memories of Christ. Somehow the 
Jordan runs like a silver stream through the 
green meadows of the New Testament. 

Some of the great figures of speech of the 
Bible center about rivers. The Psalms from 
beginning to end seem to echo the sweet music 
of flowing streams, and the greatest psalm of 
all — the twenty-third — has as its setting a 
river. "Beside still waters" is a sweet phrase, 
and it suggests a picture of a shepherd and 
his sheep and the Master and green fields that 
will never die. 

And we are reminded by the writers of the 
Bible that the nation or the human being who 
has God for Father and Christ for Brother, 
that that nation and that individual has an un- 
disturbed life, a life that has in it "peace like 
a river." 

The Christian life is an undisturbed life. 
Wars and rumors of war may come; death, 
pain, calamity, suffering, loss ; but the Christian 
does not fret, for the Christian knows down 



RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 93 

deep in his heart of hearts that "All things 
work together for good to them that love God." 

Also the Christian's destination is as inevi- 
table as that of a river. This gives him a 
sense of peace that is unshakable. A river 
knows where it is going. It may be swerved 
for a time, but it finally gets back and is on with 
its journey. You cannot thwart it. You can- 
not discourage it. It knows that it will find its 
goal, which is the ocean, just as the Christian 
knows that he will find his Father. 

Not as old pessimist, Omar, would say: 

"Into this Universe, and Why not Knowing, 
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 

And out of it, as Wind along the waste, 
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing." 

But as Christ has made possible : 

Into this Universe, and . . . Now knowing 
And Thence like water, ever onward flowing 

Toward the Ocean's boundless depth of Love ; 
Broader, swifter, deeper Godward Going! 



CHAPTER V 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 



T 



*\HE influence of the sea on the litera- 
ture of the world cannot be over- 
stated: no great literature, either 
ancient or modern, but that has, within its 
pages, the restlessness, the rolling wonder, the 
far thunder, and the near whispering of the 
sea. Men talk to and of the sea as they would 
talk of a friend or an enemy. Men express 
hate, love, envy, anger, jealousy, death, storm, 
peace, sorrow, avarice, stoicism, hysteria, sur- 
prise, suffering, weariness, calmness, turbu- 
lency — indeed, every human emotion — in 
figures of speech taken from the sea. 

Recently I heard a humble man, who was not 
an orator, but who had become strangely 
articulate because of his interest in the present 
world unrest, express the present crisis, as 
naturally as a child breathes, in a tremendous 
figure of speech taken from the sea that he 
knows so well. He said : "I was walking down 
along the Pacific Ocean a week ago near 
Monterey. There had been a terrific storm for 

94 




T3 






x/i 
> 

o 



>* 

^ 



rG 



T3 






3 

O 






B 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 95 

a week, but the storm was over and the sun was 
shining, and it was as glorious a morning as I 
have ever seen. But, much to my surprise, 
when I got down along the shore, in spite of 
the singing of the birds, the sunshine and the 
white clouds in the sky, the peaceful playing of 
little children, and smoke curling lazily from 
homes along the shore, the sea was still rest- 
less and turbulent and uneasy. It was the 
aftermath of the storm." And so it is with our 
present unrest in the world. It is an aftermath 
of the great World- War storm. The storm has 
passed, but the ocean of life is still restless. The 
waves still run high. There is still danger. 
But the oil of human kindness, the oil of the 
brotherhood of justice, of Jesus Christ, will 
calm even that restlessness in time. 

He was a comparatively ignorant, unedu- 
cated man, and yet he was speaking classical 
language. He was speaking great literature. 
He had become articulate unconsciously, and 
when he spoke the great thought that was in 
him he used the simple, natural figures of 
speech that came from the sea he knows so well. 
So it has been down through the ages. So it 
will ever and should ever be. And the won- 
derful Bible is full of figures of speech taken 
from the sea. 



96 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

It thrills one to catch these figures. One sees 
great leviathans swimming through the pages 
of the Book of books ; one hears great storms 
thundering; one sees humble men fishing; one 
sees a lonely Christ walking along the white 
sands of the sea. One feels at home in the Bible 
because one knows the sea. 

(I heard a child who, being a preacher's 
daughter, knew what moving meant, say, 
"Daddy, if we have to move let's get us an 
ocean or a lake to live by.") 

I heard a man say once, "I refuse to live any 
place where I cannot companion with a sea." 
And I have watched that man's career in the 
church, and he has never lost the ambition. 
Once I saw him living and serving his church 
down on Cape Cod, and again I saw him serv- 
ing his church out beside the Golden Gate over- 
looking the Pacific. The last time I saw him 
he was in Manila on the far shores of the 
Pacific. I have often wondered whether or not 
he deliberately shapes his life so that he may 
still "companion with a sea," as he told me one 
day. All I know is that he seems to gravitate 
as naturally toward a sea as a flower turns its 
face to the great sun. 

And the Bible is full and running over with 
seas. Sure enough, all of them are not seas in 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 97 

the way that we think of seas, for that word 
was used, as we shall see, interchangeably, to 
mean a lake, a great river, or an ocean. But of 
one thing we are certain, and that is that the 
biblical writers were familiar with the Medi- 
terranean. And of another thing we are sure : 
that the very first biblical scenes open on a 
world that is nothing but sea ; and that the very 
ending of the Book is regnant with the setting 
of a sea in the midst of which was Patmos, the 
Island of Patmos, the Island of Visions. So 
the Bible is, as it were, framed in a framework 
of seas. 

There is hardly a book in the Bible, from 
Genesis to Revelation, that does not have sev- 
eral references to the sea. The statistics of 
these references are interesting. Exodus and 
the Psalms seem to have the greatest number 
of such references ; the former having the lead 
with thirty-two, and the latter with thirty 
references. Isaiah has twenty-seven references 
to the sea. In the New Testament, Revelation 
has twenty-six references and Matthew 
eighteen. The New Testament itself has, all 
told, close to one hundred references to the sea 
in its figures of speech. 

The first inquiry that comes to the Bible 
reader is, What seas did the biblical writers 



98 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

actually know? Or did they mean by the ex- 
pression "sea" just an average lake, and a com- 
paratively small one at that, such as the Lake 
of Galilee ? 

We see many references in the Bible to snow, 
and we wonder where the Bible writers found 
their references to snow. Then we discover 
that the mountains of Galilee were covered 
with snow, and that when the snow melted in 
the spring from Mount Hermon, the waters of 
Galilee were raised several inches. 

We remember something of the thrill that 
we had in the story of the children of Israel, 
who were led through the Red Sea, and of the 
east wind that swept the waves back and then 
later drowned Pharaoh's men in the midst of 
the sea. 

It is an established scientific truth that the 
writers of the Old and the New Testaments 
were familiar with several of what they called 
"seas." One was, of course, the Red Sea. 
Then there were the Mediterranean Sea (to 
which there are references in Exodus, Num- 
bers, and Deuteronomy), the Dead Sea, and 
the Sea of Galilee. 

In addition to these references biblical 
writers also frequently referred to the Nile and 
the Euphrates as "seas." 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 99 

The Mediterranean being the limit of the 
western boundaries of Palestine, made the Old 
Testament writers familiar with the sea, and 
consequently we find them using many figures 
of speech to carry their spiritual lessons to 
those to whom they were speaking and to suc- 
ceeding generations. 

In addition to having direct knowledge of 
these four seas and the two rivers which I have 
mentioned, there were figurative references to 
the sea made by biblical writers that are fasci- 
nating in their aptness, their bigness, and their 
force. 

If there was any one thing more than any 
other thingthatwascharacteristicof the Hebrew 
writer it was his bigness of thought. He never 
thought in terms of brooks if he could get a 
river ; in terms of hills if he could get a moun- 
tain ; in terms of ponds if he could get a sea to 
express what he wanted to say. He dreamed 
big dreams of his God ; he had great thoughts, 
and he must needs choose from the biggest 
material thing his Jehovah had produced to 
carry his thought to people. 

His figurative references were to the 
"deeps," which meant to him the primeval sea 
from whence all came. His second reference 
was to the ocean stream and subterranean 



ioo OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

waters; his third, to any great quantity of 
water; his fourth, to the deep places of the 
underworld, the abode of the dead. 

The images of the sea were used in order to 
teach the lessons of man's grief, which is "as 
the unquiet sea"; the lesson of the doubtful 
man, which is as "the waves tossed by the 
wind"; the wicked men, who are "as raging 
waves of the sea foaming out their own 
shame." 

Great Moments of the Book and the Sea 

The first scenes which we have in the Bible 
are ones in which the sea covered the face of 
the earth, and God's spirit "hovered upon the 
face of the waters" or "was brooding upon the 
face of the waters." "And God said, Let 
there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, 
and let it divide the waters from the waters." 

This is a weird and wonderful scene. Some 
of us have seen it dramatized in "The Crea- 
tion" and we have felt the dense darkness of 
the chaos that was upon the earth. We have 
felt the wash of ceaseless waves ; we have felt 
and heard the thunder of ceaseless surf; we 
have felt and known the impenetrable darkness 
that was upon the face of the earth until God 
divided the waters from the land. 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 101 

Then we have thrilled, as I have said, to the 
story of the Red Sea and the children of Israel 
fleeing from their slavery ; with those dramatic 
incidents of the pause on the banks of the Red 
Sea ; the fears in the hearts of those who were 
being led; the doubtings of leadership; the 
final entry into the paths of the sea wherein the 
winds swept the waters back; the dramatic safe 
passage of God's children and the final annihi- 
lation of Pharaoh's army when the winds 
turned and swept the waters of the sea over 
them. We never had heard quite such a thrill- 
ing story as that until we read Jules Verne and 
Wells in later years. We never had read such 
a thrilling story as that until in later years we 
knew of tidal waves such as the Galveston 
wave, and tidal waves caused by earthquake 
upheavals in the midst of the sea, and buried 
continents and other sea vagaries. 

Then, when we read that marvelous thirty- 
eighth chapter of Job, we were thrilled with its 
description of the seas. We heard the thunder 
of Jehovah's voice as Job listened : 

"Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it 
brake forth as if it had issued out of the womb? 
When I made the cloud the garment thereof, 
and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it, 
and brake up for it my decreed place, and set 



102 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou 
come, but no further : and here shall thy proud 
waves be stayed ?" 

What a tremendously challenging series of 
questions that is ! How it thrills and stirs and 
subdues and humbles one in the face of the God 
of the seas and oceans ! 

Then we remembered a certain story of 
Jonah and the whale's stomach. It was a story 
of the sea. It was a story which had a figura- 
tive meaning. It was a story in which the 
writer was trying to show how Israel, God's 
people, was swallowed up in the stomach of the 
Babylonians. 

And then we remembered beautiful Galilee. 
Throughout the New Testament references to 
Galilee are many. Some of the most striking 
scenes of the New Testament take place on the 
shores of the Sea of Galilee. 

Galilee itself is not a large lake. We have 
hundreds of them larger in our own United 
States. Our Great Lakes, our Chautauquas, 
our Tahoes, are all larger than Galilee was. 

It is only about thirteen miles long by seven 
miles across. It is pear-shaped. Each spring, 
as I have said, its waters rise when the snows 
of famous old Mount Hermon melt and pour 
into it just as our own Yosemite streams and 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 103 

waterfalls are larger at noon time because of 
the snows that have melted on the mountains 
the preceding day and pour down their moun- 
tain pathways. 

Galilee is buried in a deeply depressed basin. 
Authorities say that the Sea of Galilee has not 
changed much in nineteen centuries, so that it 
is about the same as it was at that time when 
Jesus walked its beautiful banks and sailed its 
placid surface and its storm-tossed waves. 
The depth of the sea is from north to south 
along the course of the Jordan River and is 
from one hundred and thirty feet to one hun- 
dred and forty-eight feet. This does not seem 
very deep compared with our own mountain 
lakes, which are unfathomable and have been 
estimated to be thousands of feet deep. Nor 
does the Lake of Galilee mean much in size or 
beauty as compared with our Tahoe. Indeed, 
we have more than twelve hundred lakes in our 
own Sierras, many of which are larger and 
deeper and more beautiful than Galilee, but 
there is no such music in their names to charm 
the world; no such romance eternal centering 
about their very memory; no Master ever 
walked their rugged shores ; no romance of the 
Hope of the world ever centered in their blue 
waters. 



104 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Scenes on Galilee 

Some of the most wonderful stories in con- 
nection with the life and ministry of Jesus 
happened on the shores of Galilee. In fact, the 
life of Jesus might be called a great world 
drama, with the shores of Galilee as a stage 
and the sea itself as a background. It was a 
wonderfully beautiful setting. 

Flowing into the southern end of the lake is 
the River Jordan. Centered about this wonder- 
ful river, as we have seen, are some of the great 
scenes in the life of Christ: his call and his 
baptism. 

But the first scene on the shores of Galilee is 
that where he calls four of his disciples to fol- 
low him. 

"And walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw 
two brethren, Simon who is called Peter, and 
Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea ; 
for they were fishers." 

It was a beautiful scene in early morning. 
You will remember that Jesus had just come 
from his journey in the wilderness. First, there 
was his baptism in the Jordan. After this he 
walked down the Jordan and out into the 
wilderness, where his temptation occurred, and 
then back to Galilee. 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 105 

Here we see some of the truly tremendous 
moments of his life spent out of doors, on a 
river, in a wilderness, and on a sea. He went 
from the river to the woods and thence to the 
sea. 

Then when he had called the first two dis- 
ciples from fishing in blue Galilee he went a bit 
further and saw two other brothers, James the 
son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the 
boat with their father, mending their nets, and 
they straightway left the boats and followed 

Jesus. 

The Four Thousand Fed 

The second great scene was at evening time. 
The first was in the morning. There were only 
six people in the setting of the first scene. 
There are between four and five thousand in 
the evening setting. The sun has set, for 
Galilee is the lowest lake known to geologists, 
and the surrounding mountains hide the sun 
early. The four thousand had come to hear 
Jesus preach. His fame had gone throughout 
all the land about Galilee. His headquarters 
were at Capernaum, and the news of his 
miracles spread fast until people thronged 
about him. 

He saw that they had had no chance to eat 
and that hundreds of them were hungry. 



io6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

When Jesus asked how much food the disci- 
ples had, they replied that they had seven loaves 
and a few small fishes. And Jesus blessed the 
food and there was plenty and to spare. "And 
they that did eat were four thousand men, 
beside women and children." It is the scene of 
one of his most spectacular miracles, this beau- 
tiful Galilee. 

Jesus Walks the Sea 

This is nighttime. The first great scene was 
morning ; the second great scene of the feeding 
was evening; but the third great scene on the 
Lake of Galilee is nighttime. 

He had just performed the great miracle of 
feeding the thousands, and this miracle, in addi- 
tion to that of the healings that he had per- 
formed, aroused the people who followed him 
to a great pitch of enthusiasm, and they would 
make him king, whether or no. Jesus knew 
this as he stood by the lake, while evening 
shadows were gathering, and he withdrew into 
the mountains to be alone. While thus sepa- 
rated from them, his disciples, when it grew 
dark, started to cross the lake by boat to go 
into Capernaum. It was no unusual thing for 
the Master to remain out overnight in the 
mountains to pray, so they were not surprised. 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 107 

Neither did they fear for him. He had his 

way. 

He Had a Way 

He had a way — 
This Christ of ours; 

And when the day- 
Was through, and flowers 

Asleep, he went to pray. 

It was his way 

To love the seas, 
The rivers, mountains, 

Flowers, and trees; 
It was his way 

To search the sky 
By night, to know 

The stars, the clouds on high, 
He loved them so. 

He walked the Sea 
Of Galilee 
One stormy night 
With footsteps light. 
He brake the bread 
With solemn tread 
On that blest shore 
As nevermore 
Bread has been broke, 
Nor ever woke 
Such dreams, such hope 
Where humans grope. 

It was his way 

To laugh and play; 
It was his way 

To dream and pray; 



108 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

It was his way 
To end the day 
Beneath a tree 
Beside the Sea 
Of Galilee. 



One of his ways was to pray at night on the 
mountainsides. So that night they started for 
Capernaum. 

"And it was now dark," the story says in 
John, sixth chapter. And — as was frequently 
the way with the Sea of Galilee, for it had its 
peculiar ways also — a storm came up suddenly. 
They were frightened by the waves, but were 
more frightened when suddenly through the 
darkness they saw a form walking toward them 
across the turbulent waves. Jesus saw their 
fright and cried out to them, "Fear not; it is I." 

Nothing happens in the Bible that does not 
have its purpose. It is orderly history, but all 
extraneous things are left out. The essentials 
in the life of Jesus are all in the New Testa- 
ment. Much that would be fascinating reading 
has not been put in, but all that is fundamental 
has been set down for us, and it has been 
written "with a pen of iron and the point of a 
diamond." 

And there is but one reason why poets, sages, 
prophets and the disciples, and Jesus himself, 



THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 109 

spoke, and that was to teach. When they used 
a figure of speech connected with a river, a sea, 
a tree, a bird, a desert, a rock, a wave, or a 
storm, it was for a purpose. No figures of 
speech idle their way into the Book. They earn 
their way into that sacred auditorium of good 
people and good things and high and holy 
truths. 

One may go through the Bible from the be- 
ginning and find that where figures of speech 
are used in connection with the sea many 
great truths are taught thereby, but .the most 
dominant truth and the one that is more often 
repeated than any other is the great truth that 
is expressed in the phrase "He holdeth the sea 
in his hands." From the fascinating story of 
the creation of the world down through the 
early books of the Bible, through mountainlike 
Job into the tales of Galilee found in the New 
Testament, and on into Revelation, one might 
say that God is trying to show his children that 
he holds the sea in the hollow of his great, 
kindly hands of might and love. 

"And the depth of the sea is like unto the 
depth that is God's love" is the other lesson that 
prophets and poets try to teach humanity 
through figures of speech connected with the 
sea. These two stand out above all others. 



no OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

True there are many more, but these are the 
great twin stars of this figure, as it is used in 
the Book. 

Dr. Jowett tells of one of his recent trips 
across the Atlantic when the ship was passing 
over the spot where the tragedy of the Titanic 
was enacted and the captain called his attention 
to the fact, saying, "We are now passing over 
the spot where the Titanic went down." 

Dr. Jowett describes how impressive a 
moment it was to him, and then of his thought 
of the depth of God's love; his thought that 
God's love was deep enough to reach down into 
the mud of the deepest seas; high enough to 
reach into the skies ; wide enough to reach into 
the uttermost corner of the world. 



■:r|riv;a: : :,:. : 




5=1 






CD 





T3 
oj 



CO 

oj 



oj 



T3 



H 



CHAPTER VI 
THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 

JUST like every other great physical fact 
of life, deserts had their influence on the 
writers of the Bible, and they were 
usually used as figures of speech to show what 
sin would do to a nation or to a human being. 
To speak shortly, deserts and sin in the Bible 
seem to be synonymous. Sin is a desert. A 
desert is sin. 

One is astonished when he is told by science 
that the great Mojave Desert, with all of its 
burned-out stretches of waste and woe, is ex- 
actly the same soil composition as the wonder- 
ful San Joaquin Valley. Water is the differ- 
ence. Every valley in California would be like 
the Mojave Desert if it were not for irrigation. 
Water it is that makes the desert to "blossom 
as the rose/' 

The Hebrew children were most certainly 
familiar with the great waste that we call the 
Sahara Desert. The memories and knowledge 
of this terrible place run through the minds of 
all biblical writers. Just as the wonderfully 

in 



ii2 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

clear skies of Egypt made them so familiar 
with the stars, so that they used figures of 
speech connected with the stars frequently, so 
their familiarity with Egypt's great desert com- 
pelled them to express their idea of sin and its 
consequences and its punishments in figures of 
speech which meant the desolation of the 
deserts. 

So one is not surprised to find such a strong 
figure in Isaiah as "The wilderness and the dry 
land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, 
and blossom as the rose/' Bishop Quayle calls 
the desert the Great Sphinx of all nature. The 
desert is ever ominous, but fascinating in its 
danger. 

I have seen the Mojave Desert under many 
interesting circumstances. One time that I 
crossed it — six times, to be exact — it was dry 
and parching under summer suns. I think that 
I have never seen or dreamed of anything that 
could be more desolate than the Mojave Desert. 
You have seen inland tracts of land where 
under a hot sun the earth bakes in great cakes 
of hard, dry earth, as though a miniature earth- 
quake had cracked seams all through it. For 
hundreds of miles I have seen the Mojave 
Desert like this. Arid, acrid, blistered, burned, 
baked, sated, anemic, hated, bronzed, seared, 



THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 113 

singed, dead, desolate, lost, barren — are all 
words that will describe some feature of the 
Mojave Desert under the summer sun. 

Alkali pools here and there, white and ghost- 
like as the death that they verily hold for 
humanity, glimmer and stink under the blister- 
ing sun. For miles at a stretch one will see the 
stain of this alkali glinting under the sun's rays 
like snow glistening in the light of the great orb 
of day — glittering as diamonds glitter. 

Sagebrush and mesquite abound, and great, 
high-reaching cactus, that looms in the day and 
in the night like some huge, armed phantom of 
the desert reaching to squeeze one's very soul 
to death. 

Joaquin Miller's "Ship of the Desert" is one 
of the most thrilling poems of American 
topography. It is the story of a great ship that 
sailed over the western continent when the 
ocean was still finding its bed and its pathways 
on our plains, ere it had been bulged back by 
the upheavals of the Rocky Mountains. And 
the tale is told that a ship has been found 
buried in the sand in the middle of the great 
American Desert in recent years. But it is a 
ghost ship, as are all things connected with the 
desert. 

I have seen the desert by middle morning, 



ii4 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

when I thought, as the train lunged through 
its blistering heat, that I could not manage to 
take another breath, when I stood with a towel 
at the faucet of the ice-water tank, applying it 
to my head for relief. 

I have seen the Mojave Desert with its dry 
river and creek beds running for hundreds of 
miles without a single drop of water, panting 
under the blistering suns, like a tired dog, done 
out with his hanging tongue lifeless. The rivers 
and the creeks of the desert are the hanging 
tongues of the dog of the desert. The tongue 
of the dog desert is always out in summer time, 
hanging lifeless. 

But I have seen the Mojave Desert also when 
it was a thing of marvelous beauty. One mid 
afternoon, off in the distance right in the path- 
way of the train I saw a beautiful lake, such as 
many a weary traveler has seen before on 
desert journeyings. It arose against the 
horizon, and after awhile I could see a city on 
the shores of this lake. And such a beautiful 
city it was! I imagined that it was like the 
Celestial City of white minarets, domes, and 
towers. The blue, cool waters of the lake, and 
the golden domes of the city beside the lake I 
was sure was the next stopping place. I called 
the conductor of the car and asked him what 



THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 115 

lake that was off in the distance, and what was 
the name of the city, and he looked at me in 
utter amazement, and he looked at me with a 
queer look — as if I were crazy, and I guess I 
was, for there was no lake there and there was 
no city there. I had heard of a mirage all my 
life, but I didn't have sense enough to recognize 
one when I saw it. 

I have seen an Arizona afterglow — and I 
think that I have seen nothing more beautiful 
than this on the desert. It is not like a sunset ; 
it is more subtle, it is more weird, it is more 
beautiful. I think that this desert afterglow 
must be to the desert what the aurora borealis 
is to the frozen planes of the north. It scintil- 
lates with beauty. Then it is soft with a strange 
wonder. It turns the tawny earth, and jutting 
cliffs, and flat hilltops to a strange copper, 
bronze, purple hue. It subdues one, this after- 
glow on the desert, subdues one like unto an 
evening prayer. The Angelus of the desert is 
the afterglow. 

I have seen automobiles passing across the 
desert, and I have heard, even in these modern 
days, ghostly stories of automobile parties 
found dead of thirst, a hundred miles from a 
human being or a drop of water. I have seen 
bronzed Indians burned and blistered, driving 



n6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

their sluggish ponies with water — precious 
water — on their wagons. 

I have seen the bleached bones of cattle and 
horses, skeleton after skeleton, lying along the 
tracks. I have seen here and there the coyote, 
the waif of the desert, bounding across the 
acrid plains. I have seen, reaching up from a 
little mound here and there across the everlast- 
ing desert, white crosses that have been erected 
to mark the dying place of hosts of intrepid 
pioneers. 

But I have another picture of this same 
desert region of America. It is a picture of the 
desert after the rains. It is a picture of swollen 
streams instead of dry beds of water; it is a 
picture of freshness and cleanness, and life and 
vegetation. It is a picture of shooting herbs, 
and of a far spread of green, and an odor of 
growing things. And, best of all, it is a picture 
of a perfect mass, a blanket of beautiful, tiny 
flowers, springing up almost overnight to cry 
out to the world that the desert has not been 
entirely deserted of all beauty and color. I 
have seen the desert where the Rio Grande and 
the Colorado flow, and I have seen green 
stations springing up with trees and flowers, 
and as beautiful lawns as I ever saw in any 
place to bless the inhabitants thereof. 



THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 117 

And even amid the most desolate of days — 
even amid the most arid of stretches for hun- 
dreds of miles around — I have seen a little 
home, where the keeper thereof had brought 
water from the mountains; and there I have 
seen trees growing, and grass in a neatly kept 
lawn, and flowers on the window sill, and little 
children playing in the yard, and a mother 
waving from the window as the great train 
thundered past on into the burning, parching 
desert 

And then I have had a dream in a poem of 
what this great desert may some day be. I 
have dreamed as I have passed through this 
desert time after time, with the dying earth and 
nothing else for hundreds of miles around me, 
and the pulsing heat beating in through the 
window of the fast-running train blistering my 
face — one hundred and eighteen in the shade 
— and, as I have talked with men who know, 
and they have told me that exactly the same 
kind of soil prevails in this great desert that 
we find in the most fertile section of beautiful 
California, and I have looked off across that 
same desert as the train sped and I have seen 
the great, snow-capped mountains, looming in 
the background, awaiting the day when men 
will take their freshness and their life-giving 



n8 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

properties, and their Hope across these desert 
plains; and as I have looked I have dreamed 
of the next hundred years, when the European 
wars are over and the immigration of the old 
world has found that it must crowd out on to 
the desert — and the necessity of the case has 
made our great engineers bring these waters 
of the mountain snows into the desert places — 
and I have dreamed a greater city than Los 
Angeles and a greater city than San Francisco 
in the midst of the Mojave Desert. 

And then I have heard sweeping across the 
desert winds by noon, whispering like a 
phantom ghost of prophecy — a voice whining 
like a dying soul of white wistfulness, wailing 
like a Moses in sight of the promised land, only 
not to be a part of it: "The wilderness and the 
solitary place shall be glad for them; and the 
desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." 

Deserts of the Bible 

To get a fair idea of what the deserts of the 
Bible mean one must, first of all, revise his 
definition of a desert a little. The Bible desert 
means, in addition to a Sahara, a "wilderness," 
where there is no habitation. These words are 
used interchangeably in the Bible: a wilderness 
and a desert. 



THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 119 

The various interpretative words and 
phrases that we find used in the Bible to 
describe a desert or a wilderness are : 

Where herds are driven. 

Without a settled population. 

The abode of pelicans. 

Where wild asses and jackals and ostriches 
dwell. 

A dry land. 

To be arid. 

Salt land. 

Desolate — Devastation — Waste. 

In the howling waste of the desert. 

The two great deserts that stand out in Old 
and in New Testament history are "the wilder- 
ness of the wanderings" and "the wilderness of 
Judaea/' the former that section of country 
southwest of Canaan, south of the Mediter- 
ranean Sea, through which the children of 
Israel wandered; and the latter the wilderness 
of Judaea, which witnessed the commencement 
of John the Baptist's ministry. 

Two hundred and eighty times in the Old 
Testament the figure of speech has to do with 
the wilderness and the desert, and, except in 
twelve instances, in these two hundred and 
eighty times the translation of the Hebrew 
word is "wilderness." In twelve cases it is 



120 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

translated "desert" and one of these is that of 
our text, where it is used as both "wilderness" 
and as "desert," Isaiah evidently intending it 
as a figure that should include both desert and 
wilderness, to make it stronger. 

He meant to say that, although your country, 
your race, your souls be as dry, arid, desolate, 
burned, parched, blistered, and bronzed, as 
sated, anemic, bleached, as dead in sin as the 
wilderness and as the desert, yet the flowing 
streams of the everlasting love of God will 
make them to "blossom as the rose." 

Sin is the desert. Sin is Mojave. Sin is the 
sneaking coyote of the desert. Sin is the acrid 
salt of the desert. Sin is the burning, poisonous 
alkali. Sin is the baked, dead earth. Sin is the 
shadow of death that hangs over a life like a 
deceitful mirage. Sin is hate. Sin is the 
scorpion of the desert. Sin dries up the soul. 
Sin burns up the freshness of the heart. Sin 
saps the cleaner emotions of life. Sin kills the 
beautiful and the pure in a human soul. Love 
of art, love of flowers, love for beautiful music, 
love for children, love for wife and home is all 
burned out of a soul that is full of sin. Sin 
makes a soul like a desert. 

And there is just one thing that will break 
up the dried, baked soul; just one thing that 



THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 121 

will bring back the freshness, the purity, the 
hope, the sweetness to the soil of that life and 
make the desert of a sin-sated soul "blossom as 
the rose," and that is the love of Jesus Christ, 
and the rivers of the water of life that flow 
through him. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 

A STUDY of the stars is full of strange 
fascination. What individual is there 
who is not filled with a lively interest 
when he sees a "star" shoot in the skies ? That 
brilliant, far-off flash, which comes so suddenly 
and is so suddenly gone — so suddenly, indeed, 
that you scarcely have time to call your friend's 
attention to it. It burns itself out along a path- 
way that may have stretched out thousands of 
miles before coming into the earth's atmos- 
phere, which converted it into the ball of fire 
that you see; and though it may cover a long 
distance as a burning mass, yet it is all over so 
quickly that you hardly have time to send a 
message from your eye to your brain and 
thence from your brain to your lips to shout the 
news to your friend. One night crossing the 
great Pacific we counted nine stars that loosed 
their anchors in the tropical sky and plunged 
their fiery pathway to extinction. 

The Bible is full of intensely interesting 
things, as I have said before, from poetry and 

122 




> 
CD 

b 

O 



^ 

£ 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 123 

romance — old-fashioned romance in the Song 
of Songs — to the great drama of Job ; from the 
most fascinating war stories to marvelous tales 
of the sky and stars. 

The attitude of the Bible toward the stars is 
first, that God created them. The third verse 
of the eighth psalm reads: "When I consider 
thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon 
and the stars, which thou hast ordained ; what 
is man, that thou art mindful of him and the 
son of man, that thou visitest him ?" 

Second, that he gave them their paths accord- 
ing to fixed and unchangeable laws. Job, 
chapter 38, verse 31, says: "Canst thou bind 
the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the 
bands of Orion ?" 

Third, that he calls them by their names. In 
Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 26, we find: "Lift up 
your eyes on high, and behold who hath created 
these things, that bringeth out their host by 
number : he calleth them all by names." 

The Stars of the Bible 

The constellation of the Great Bear is men- 
tioned in Job. We are familiar with it to-day 
and can see it to-night if we look up at the 
skies. 

The constellation Orion — mentioned also in 



124 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Job — literally means "The Fool/' the Arabian 
name for "Orion/' that constellation which 
seems to form the shape of a man, "The im- 
pious one." The Chaldeans called it "The 
Giant." Therefore Job says of this star in 
rebuking his questioners, "Canst thou loose the 
bands of Orion?" Job pictures Orion as a 
great, impious giant chained to the heavens. 
Where will you find a more vivid or interesting 
picture than this ? 

"Pleiades" used in Job means "heap," 
"plenty," "cluster," "multitude," and consists 
of seven larger stars and seven smaller ones 
grouped together in the sky. The Arabs called 
this cluster of stars "The Star" par excellence 
because of its monthly conjunction with the 
moon. They used this conjunction to mark 
time by. 

The Persian Poets, including Omar Khay- 
yam, thought of Pleiades as a beautiful rosette, 
with a heart for a central star. 

The name used by Luther was "Die Glucke." 
"The Clucking Hen" reminds one of the Eng- 
lish name "Hen and Chickens" — a large star, 
the mother hen surrounded by a number of 
smaller stars, the chickens, likened to a hen 
with her brood under her wings. Maybe Jesus 
was looking into the skies, and this figure sug- 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 125 

gested itself to him as he stood that night over 
Jerusalem on the hill, and said, "O Jerusalem, 
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how 
often would I have gathered thy children to- 
gether, even as a hen gathers her chickens 
under her wings, and ye would not !" 

The sign of the zodiac, which comes forth in 
season and cannot be led forth, is also men- 
tioned in Job (see Job 38. 32). 

Job was the great star man. He may have 
been the great pessimist ; he may have been the 
great discouraged man for a time, but after a 
while he looked up at the stars and, when he 
looked, his hope sprang anew in his breast and 
he was unafraid. Job didn't look down long. 
To look up at the stars may do many things for 
you, but one thing it will do that I am certain 
about, and that is that it will make you very 
humble. And another thing that it will do will 
be to fill your heart with hope forever. The 
stars are God's hope beacons. Job speaks of 
"the chambers of the south," a group of stars 
that looked to him like great opening doors to 
the sky chambers. 

The Assyrians and the Hebrews both knew 
that Venus, our own particular star, was both 
a morning and an evening star. They called it 



126 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

"The Shining One," "Son of the Morning," 
etc. 

The Bible is full of references to the sun and 
the moon — for example: "When the sun went 
down," "Till the sun be hot," "Clear as the 
sun," "The greater of the two great lights," 
"To rule the day," "The tabernacle of the sun," 
"Rejoiceth as a bridegroom coming out of his 
chamber, and as a strong man to run a race." 

The moon is spoken of as "The lesser light 
to rule the night." 

For four millenniums before the Hebrew 
people, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the 
Babylonians, the Egyptians had been studying 
the stars. But they had been studying them as 
gods, as forces in themselves influencing both 
men and the earth. They were so powerful 
that they could influence by magic vegetation 
and human destiny. Certain crops and certain 
favored people thrived under certain conjunc- 
tions of stars. We still, some of us, cherish as 
a relic of those days of ignorance the idea that 
certain things planted "in the light of the new 
moon" will thrive better than if planted at any 
other time. 

The ancients mentioned also believed that 
certain stars influenced the lives of men. 

The Hebrews taught the world a new idea 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 127 

of our relation to the stars, and Christianity 
has strengthened that teaching. Christianity- 
has taught the world that, instead of the stars 
having power to kill or slay or influence, they 
are under the powerful hand of the Eternal 
God. God is the Master of the stars. Man is 
free from their harmful influence. 

Shakespeare caught the Christian attitude 
toward the stars, as contrasted with the old 
attitude, in these words: "The fault, dear 
Brutus, is not in our stars that we are under- 
lings, but in ourselves." In shorter words, God 
has freed us from the influence of the stars, and 
has given us right to go our own free ways to 
carve our own fortunes eternally — to lose or to 
save our own immortal souls ! 

When I Consider Thy Heavens 

Some people need to go out and look at the 
stars a while to awaken them to a recognition 
of their own insignificance. It is good medi- 
cine for certain marked types of egotism. The 
less intelligence a human being has the less he 
sees in the stars. A pig never knows that there 
are any such things as stars. I doubt if 
the cattle of the field ever see the stars. 

The higher the type of intelligence the more 
men see in the stars of God, the Eternal. God 



128 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

is not the stars. The stars are not God, That 
is pantheism. But God is back of the stars. 
He handles them. He swerves them. He 
guides them. He operates them. 

He is the Dispatcher. I have been in a great 
train dispatcher's office in Pittsburgh, where 
hundreds of trains a day are directed in and out 
of Pittsburgh. I have watched the dispatcher 
with his charts before him ; watched him direct- 
ing freight trains, express trains, locals, by the 
hundreds. It was a marvelously fascinating 
study. I can see God, the great Dispatcher of 
the heavens, constantly doing this very thing 
with his ultimate consciousness, with ease, with 
power, with concentration, with poise, with 
perfect unity. 

I say, when you get to feeling slightly about 
God and greatly about; yourself — your poor, 
little, infinitesimal self — go out and look at the 
stars, as Sid says in the American Magazine: 

If Your Ego Bothers You — Go Look at the Stars 

A cube one seven-thousandth of an inch in diameter is 
a pretty small object. It would not choke a mosquito. 
You could not see it unless you used a microscope. Pos- 
sibly, if it were made of the right kind of stuff, and if it 
flew into your eye, you might feel it. But even that is 
doubtful. 

Yet "Uncle John" Brashear, in his delightful article in 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 129 

this number, shows that a little cube just that big floating 
around in Lake Erie takes up exactly as much room in the 
lake, by comparison, as our earth fills in the space around 
us, known and measured by astronomers, the boundaries 
of which are only as far away as the nearest star. 

This recalls Mark Twain's great story, "Captain Storm- 
field's Visit to Heaven," wherein are recorded the diffi- 
culties which the captain confronted in the next world 
when he tried to explain where he came from. He said 
that San Francisco was his native place. Nobody in 
heaven had heard of San Francisco. Then he named 
California, and, meeting with no response, he went on 
with considerable irritation to mention the United States 
and America. Nobody had heard of them. Finally he 
claimed the earth as his former home, and at last, after a 
long search through the records of heaven, it was dis- 
covered that among the billions upon billions of stars, 
worlds, constellations and planets there was, in the dusty 
tomes, a slight reference to an insignificant speck known 
in heaven as The Wart, and recognized by Stormfield as 
our good old mother earth. 

In this connection it is also well to remember that the 
wonders of time are as great as the wonders of space. 
Nobody knows or can even guess how long this Big Show 
has been running. Anyway, it is a very old show as well 
as a very large one. 

I am glad that "Uncle John" has brought this matter 
to our attention again. It is a good thing once in a while 
to be set right on our comparative importance in the 
scheme of things. At this time it is an especially welcome 
and refreshing bit of comment. For one thing, it makes 
the emperor of Germany seem less important. Also, it 
will help us to pass through the egotism and dogmatism 
of a Presidential campaign with better perspective and 
more humor. Furthermore, the hardships we have to 



130 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

endure may be nothing compared with those which are 
pestering the inhabitants of other worlds, who, for all we 
know, may be even more self-centered and sensitive than 
we — though this seems hardly possible. 

That a knowledge of the stars helps to keep one's ego in 
proper restraint is demonstrated in the case of Mr. 
Brashear himself, for in all Pittsburgh, so Merle Crowell 
tells me, there isn't a man with less ego than "Uncle 
John." Anybody, from the mayor down to the tiniest 
newsboy on Smithfield Street, will swear to you that he is 
the biggest man in the city — and the simplest and most 
attractive. Street-car motormen and conductors spy the 
old gentleman a block away and hold up traffic for the 
privilege of getting him as a passenger. They love him 
because he loves them — and because arrogance and supe- 
riority are totally absent from his make-up. From studying 
the stars "Uncle John" has learned humility. 



And if, again, in modern statistics you want 
to feel your own utter dependence, and your 
insignificance, and if you want to know what 
the psalmist was talking about when he said, 
"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy 
fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast 
ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful 
of him, and the son of man that thou visitest 
him?" go out under the night skies awhile 
alone. Mr. John Brashear, in The American 
Magazine, says: 

No man can study the stars without becoming bigger 
and better. The earth is too much with most of us; and 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 131 

we are inclined to be too much with and within ourselves. 
We have an exaggerated sense of our own importance in 
the world and of the importance of the world in the 
universe. 

The science of the stars must always remain an un- 
finished science. There are infinite areas of unexplored 
wonders that will never come within the compass of the 
eye of man until the glass through which he now sees 
darkly shall be needed no more. 

Most folks consider this old world a pretty big place, 
but if you tossed a cube one-seven thousandth of an inch 
in diameter into Lake Erie it would occupy the same 
relative space in that great inland sea that our earth occu- 
pies in a universe terminating at the nearest star, Alpha 
Centauri, and extending a similar distance from our sun 
in all directions. Such a universe contains 15,625,000,000,- 
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (fifteen thousand 
six hundred and twenty-five undecillion) miles, but it is 
only an infmitestimal dot in the actual universe. Our sun 
itself is one million three hundred thousand times as big 
as the earth, but photometric measures have shown that 
the heat-giver of our solar system is greatly exceeded in 
size by perhaps a majority of the millions of stars that 
stud the heavens. 

If you could ride from the earth to Alpha Centauri, on 
a train going at the rate of a mile a minute, you would 
reach your destination in forty-eight million years. At 
the rate sound travels, if a song were to be sung on Alpha 
Centauri it would be three million eight hundred thousand 
years before we could hear it. This neighbor of ours is 
thirty-five trillion miles away. A spider's thread from a 
cocoon reaching to it would weigh five hundred tons. 

Our earth in its revolutions on •its own axis and its trip 
around the sun and outward into space makes a journey 
of nine hundred and eighty- four million miles a year ; but 



132 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

the old clock never varies; there is never a jar or tremor, 
and we are back again on the hundredth of a second. Do 
you know it would have cost me one billion five hundred 
million dollars if I had to pay my way so far at the rate 
of two cents a mile during my journey of seventy-five 
years ? 

We usually think of the sun as a big ball of fire that is 
benignant enough to keep the earth from freezing. But 
science shows us that the sun can supply two billion two 
hundred million worlds like the earth with " the same 
amount of heat — and not work overtime. If we could 
build a column of ice fifteen miles in diameter from the 
earth to the moon, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand 
miles away, and then turn the sun's terrific heat on it, it 
would take just one second to convert all that ice into 
steam. 

But we do not have to go roaming through space to find 
wonderful things. The lover of the beautiful finds in the 
colors of a rose the same light waves that stream from the 
stars; he finds a kinship between the rushing locomotive 
and the motion of the stellar worlds through space. 

The more we study familiar things the more beauty we 
find. If we study them scientifically, so much the better. 
Some folks declare that science robs us of the pleasing 
sense of awe and mystery. Ah, no! Science merely 
replaces one mystery with another of a greater and 
grander order. 

Does it strip the beauty from a landscape photograph if 
you are told that, during the exposure of your camera, 
from forty to eighty million of light waves hammered 
against the negative in one tenth of a second? Maclaurin 
has given this splendid illustration of what it means when 
a ray of violet light impinges on the negative for that 
length of time: 

"Imagine you are watching a log floating near the sea- 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 133 

shore and that it strikes against a pier as it rises and falls 
with the waves, say, once in six seconds. In order to 
correspond to the number of light waves in one tenth of a 
second it would have to beat against that pier for more 
than two million years/' 

One night I spent at Lick Observatory on 
Mount Hamilton, California. I had there a 
revelation. I had lived in the valleys and the 
low lands so long that I had come to think of 
the stars as all being on one plane. That night 
as I looked into the Milky Way through the 
great telescope of that world-famous observa- 
tory I saw the stars for the first time in many 
planes. Plane after plane, depth after depth 
twinkled before my astonished eyes, and my 
soul was stirred as it had never been stirred 
before by sight of stars. 

I was not only seeing the front yard of the 
star-world but I was seeing the back yard as 
well. And beyond that back yard I was seeing 
the star meadows and fields ; and back of them 
I was seeing a deep, dense forest of stars ; and 
back of that, several rivers of stars flowing into 
an ocean of stars. Then I saw an entire moun- 
tain range of stars, and from this mountain 
range of stars there were volcanoes belching 
innumerable stars into birth. Back of this 
mountain range of stars I saw far reaches of 



134 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

prairies of stars and other oceans and other 
nations of stars until I was dizzy with the depth 
of the star-planes. 

One is impressed with the great spiritual 
thought that God created these stars; that he 
runs their destinies with world-old laws that 
are unswerving; that he made their paths and 
set them going therein, even the path of a 
Haley's Comet, a century long; that he calls 
them by name ; that he who numbers the hairs 
of my head and does not fail to notice even the 
falling of a common sparrow, that he has 
named me also. One is impressed with the fact 
that he too, like Job, may look up and be the 
great star man : always hopeful, always looking 
up and not down ; filling one's heart with hope ; 
and at the same time filling one's soul with a 
divine humility. 

And one has hope that through the stars we 
may be brought closer to that great star that 
shone over Bethlehem's humble bed and to the 
Christ for whom it shone — the star of Eternal 
Hope, the star of a great Beacon Light. And, 
as one studies the stars of the Bible, he has hope 
that he too may learn, through them, to chum 
with the God of Stars like our beloved John 
Muir, of whom it was written when he passed 
from the vallev to the hills and thence to the 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 135 

mountain peaks and beyond to walk amid the 
stars with God: 

"John of the Mountains, 

Wonderful John, 
Is over the summit 

And traveling on. 
With a smile and a hail 

Where the glaciers slide 
And a streak of red 

Where the Condors glide 

And John is over the Great Divide. 

"John of the Mountains 

Camps to-day 
By a level spot 

On the Milky Way. 
And God is telling him 

How he rolled 
The smoking earth 

From the iron mold, 

Planted the Redwood trees of old 
And hammered the mountains 

Till they grew cold. 

"John of the Mountains 
Says, 'I knew 
And I just wanted to 
Grapple the hand of You. 
And now that we've met 
I know we'll be Chums 
And camp together 'till chaos comes/ " 

It was on the way from Shanghai to Manila 
that I caught my first glimpse of that most 
satisfying of all the star groups of the skies, the 



136 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Southern Cross. Night by night from Manila 
to Java I watched it. It came to be a part of 
one's very soul. It was a most satisfying thing. 
Early in the evening it was slightly tilted as 
the cross of Christ must have been when it was 
first thrust into the hole that had been dug for 
it, but by midnight the Southern Cross in 
Manila, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, 
or any southern viewpoint stands erect in the 
skies, near the zenith, like a mighty cross of 
white fire and glory. The missionaries in the 
tropics tell me that this constellation of stars 
comes to be to them an old friend, like a moun- 
tain or a river. They look up at it each night. 
When terror spreads, disease threatens, perils 
by day and night encompass them, discourage- 
ments confront them, somehow that fiery cross 
of Christ hovers over them in the far off equa- 
torial lands to comfort and bless. It hovers 
over them like God's great friendly hands in 
blessing. It says unto them each night, 
"Peace, be still." 

For eight months the Southern Cross has 
been a constant companion. Sometimes I 
would glimpse it from the mountaintops of 
Luzon in the Philippine Islands; sometimes 
from a small boat on a river's breast in Borneo; 
sometimes from my couch on the hillside at 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 137 

night, where Java's volcanoes spit fire; some- 
times through the trees of a jungle trail in 
Sumatra; sometimes from north of the 
equator, sometimes from south of the equator; 
sometimes from the top of a mission house at 
midnight; sometimes from the deck of a ship 
on seven seas. 

But the one time that it burned its way into 
my memory never to die was during a typhoon 
on the South China Sea between Borneo and 
Singapore. It had been blowing so terrifically, 
with now and then that hushed, ominous warn- 
ing of more terrific winds yet to come, that I 
became terrified, and, dressing, left my state- 
room and went to the bridge of the small Dutch 
ship, whose captain I had come to know inti- 
mately. 

He was anxiously pacing up and down the 
bridge. The sky was sullen and starless. Not 
a ray of light penetrated that black blanket of 
gloom anywhere from horizon to horizon. 

Two hours passed. I searched the sky 
anxiously minute after minute to catch even a 
faint glimpse of a star. I had a feeling that if 
I could but see one single star, it would mean 
promise and hope. 

We were sailing due south because of the 
wind. The little ship was less than five hun- 



138 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

dred tons and the South China Sea was 
ferociously playing with it. 

Then suddenly the sky seemed to slit in two 
to the south and a star — a single star — 
appeared. The captain smiled at me and 
pointed. A few minutes later the southern 
winds swept back a further patch of black 
clouds and another star appeared to the left and 
further down in the sky toward the horizon. 
Then a third star appeared to the right oppo- 
site the second star. 

At once I realized that a tremendous thing 
was happening before my bewildered eyes. It 
seemed like a miracle. It seemed like God's 
promise of safety from storm. It brought back 
the miracle of the rainbow on the way to 
France. It was so dramatically wonderful that 
I hesitate to tell it, as appearing like some fig- 
ment of an author's imagination; but with a 
shout in my soul and a song on my lips before 
tear-dimmed eyes suddenly the clouds were 
drawn back by the southern winds, as if the 
hands of God were in them and behind them, 
and the full and beautiful form of that star- 
born Southern Cross lay peacefully against the 
sky shining out over Java and the world. Other 
stars had been breaking through these storm- 
hid skies, but for mine eyes there was no such 



THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 139 

glory that storm-flung night, and no such 
peace, no such beauty, and no such thrilling 
hope as that suggested by the white cross in the 
southern sky. 

So I think the cross of Christ, that white 
cross of all skies, must mean to the world when 
its storms thunder and its skies are black. 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 

IN a wonderfully interesting book by this 
title, published by The Methodist Book 
Concern, Gene Stratton-Porter names 
seventeen distinct species of birds of the Bible 
and gives a chapter to each bird. These birds 
that are mentioned frequently in the Bible are 
the dove, the eagle, the sparrow, the ostrich, 
the cock and hen, the hawk, the quail and 
partridge, the bittern, the swallow, the peacock, 
the stork, the raven, the pelican, the pigeon, the 
crane, and the owl. 

More and more as one studies the Book he 
finds that the writers of the Bible were out-of- 
doors men, and that they were writing to an 
out-of-doors people, and that they used out-of- 
doors figures of speech to make themselves 
understood by those to whom they were talking. 

Beginning with Moses, Mrs. Porter says that 
more references to birds are found in the 
writings of Moses than in the writings of any 
other character of the Bible. There were two 
reasons for this. The first one was that Moses 

140 













o 






3 
O 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 141 

had access to all of the bird lore, all of the 
books and writings and knowledge of the court 
of Pharaoh, where he lived. The second reason 
was that Egypt was an out-of-doors land ; and 
the people that Moses led out of their captivity- 
lived an out-of-doors life. They didn't know 
what it meant to have shelter from storms, or 
sun or rain. They were compelled to live out of 
doors. They understood the out-of-doors. 
They knew what the stars in the clear Egyptian 
heavens looked like. They knew the animals of 
the desert ; they knew the birds ; they knew the 
Nile. Therefore, when Moses wanted them to 
understand clearly what he was trying to tell 
them, he used figures of speech that had refer- 
ences to the lives of the birds, just as we have 
seen heretofore in this series that writers of the 
Bible have used figures of speech with refer- 
ences to trees, stars, rivers, mountains, deserts, 
clouds, waves, fog, and snow. If all the figures 
of speech that teach great spiritual lessons 
through the medium of out-of-doors references, 
were taken out of the Bible, it would look like 
a great honeycomb with the honey removed. 
One grows more and more astonished as he 
follows out a thought of this kind at the almost 
innumerable references to out-of-doors objects. 
But at the same time one knows the reason 



142 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

therefor when he stops to remember that from 
Moses down to John on Patmos, every great 
character and nearly every great incident of 
the Bible had as its stage setting the great out 
of doors. And of all the figures with reference 
to out-of-doors things, perhaps the figures with 
reference to birds will capture and have 
captured human hearts with the most appeal. 
Some of the most tender quotations of the 
entire Book have been quotations in reference 
to birds. 

It was a tenderly pathetic cry of Jesus him- 
self, who said : "The foxes have holes, and the 
birds of the air have nests ; but the Son of man 
hath not where to lay his head." 

It was the sweet voice of poet David who 
tried to show the people to whom he sang the 
protecting power and the everlasting love of the 
Father heart: "He shall cover thee with his 
feathers and under his wings shalt thou trust." 

Do you want to take a walk out into the 
woods of Lebanon in spring-time ? Do you want 
to be transported, even amid winter's snows 
and summer's heat, into the cool, awaken- 
ing woods of early spring? Then go to the 
Song of Solomon, that sweet love lyric: "For, 
lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone ; 
the flowers appear on the earth ; the time of the 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 143 

singing of birds is come, and the voice of the 
turtle is heard in our land ; the fig tree putteth 
forth her green figs, and the vines with the 
tender grape give a good smell." 

Or, again, hear David, sweet singer, as he 
says, "I will trust in the covert of thy wings" ; 
or, again: "In the Lord put I my trust: how 
say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your moun- 
tains?" And in his prayer that he be kept he 
pleads, "Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide 
me under the shadow of thy wings." 

And of all the tender words that Jesus spoke, 
the tenderest are these: "O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
salem, that killest the prophets, and stonest 
them which are sent unto thee, how often would 
I have gathered thy children together, even as 
a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, 
and ye would not !" 

Then, next to the above sighing of a great 
heart, there is one other to rival it in beauty of 
imagery: "Yea, the sparrow hath found a 
house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where 
she may lay her young, even thine altars, O 
Lord of hosts, my King and my God." 

Mrs. Porter says, in Birds of the Bible, 
already referred to, a thing that we know to be 
true in regard to our own temples and 
churches: "Because so many of the swallows 



144 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

nested in the temples, the whole species was 
held almost sacred, for any bird which built in 
a place of worship was supposed to be claiming 
the protection of the Almighty." Many a boy 
has heard in springtime the twittering of 
sparrows in the eaves of the old home church 
of a Sunday morning while the preacher was 
preaching. Some of us have memories of doves 
and pigeons nesting in the old belfry of the 
church, and vividly recall the hurried flight of 
those birds when the sexton rang the bells for 
church. 

One morning during the great war I was in 
France. I was sitting in springtime beside the 
great cathedral at Toul. It was a wonderfully 
beautiful morning, full of throbbing spring. 
Off in the distance I could hear the great guns 
rumbling. It seemed so incongruous that guns 
should be in action on such a beautiful morning. 
It was my last day on the line. I had received 
orders to leave that noontime and I was taking 
a last look at that beautiful old cathedral. An 
aviation camp was located in the fields below 
Toul. As I sat on a stone bench in the little 
park beside the church now and then an air- 
plane would hum overhead, so low down that 
its shadow would pass over the great stone 
cathedral and frighten the thousands of birds 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 145 

that found shelter in its little crannies and 
crevices. Each time a humming plane would 
pass overhead, what seemed to be like a veri- 
table cloud of birds would swarm into the air, 
darting out of little holes and sheltering places, 
crevices and crannies where they had found 
shelter. For a few minutes they would literally 
make the air black overhead and fill it with the 
din of their frightened chattering. The only 
other memory I have of such a dense cloud of 
birds is of the time when as a boy, of a summer 
evening, I went swimming in the old Ohio 
River. I remember that often for hours at a 
time the sky would be literally obscured by 
dense clouds of birds flying southward follow- 
ing the pathway of the river. 

I wondered at so many birds about the old 
cathedral. I asked the people if that was usual, 
and they told me that the birds always found 
shelter in the edifice, but that since the war 
began it seemed that many hundreds of thou- 
sands had come that had never been seen there 
before. They said that it seemed to them that 
all the birds of France had flown to the great 
cathedrals back of the lines for shelter. They 
had always been accustomed to seeing birds 
about the cathedrals, but never in such clouds 
and masses and swarms. They had decided 



146 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

that all the birds of the fields and woods along 
the front had been frightened back from their 
places of habitation and that they too, like the 
distracted people of France, had taken shelter 
in the temples of God in war time. Now and 
then we read a poem such as Service has 
written for us of a lark blithely singing amid 
the thundering guns, but those who were on the 
front lines for any length of time know also 
that birds were seldom seen anywhere. They 
had all been driven back. And the truth came 
to me on that spring morning, with startling 
suddenness and startling warmth, that the birds 
of distracted France had literally fulfilled the 
scriptures and had found refuge in the temples 
of God. And so it is that Mrs. Porter, in her 
Birds of the Bible, confirms the childhood 
memory of some of us: of twittering birds in 
the eaves of the old home-town church. The 
thought takes us back to the temple in Jeru- 
salem, and recalls David's song of the sparrow 
that had found her nest at the altars of God's 
temple. 

Kow the Birds of Literature Teach Their 
Lessons 

Not only the writers of the Bible use the 
birds to teach great truths to humanity, but the 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 147 

writers of all time have used the birds to teach 
their lessons. 

Hear the great Burke sing the truth that he 
learned from the lark : 

"Teach me, O lark ! with thee to greatly rise 
To exalt my soul and lift it to the skies !" 

Or Byron : 

"A light broke in upon my soul — 

It was the carol of a bird; 
It ceased, and then it came again; 
The sweetest song ear ever heard." 

Shakespeare calls the lark "the herald of the 
morn" and Browning, in "Pippa Passes/' sings 
of the lark as the morning bird : "The lark's on 
the wing/' Henry van Dyke and a dozen other 
poets sing of the dove as the homing bird of 
evening shadows. 

And the bird of the night is by the poets 
called the owl And the bird of blazing noon- 
time is the eagle; the eagle who dares to fly 
straight into the sun. Tennyson sings of him : 

"He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 
Close to the sun in lonely lands." 

Or who can forget Longfellow's soothing 
cry for a poem from "some humbler poet": 

"Like a feather wafted downward 
From an eagle in its flight." 



148 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Not less striking are the words of Bishop 
Quayle, poet and preacher, who, reaching out 
into the skies for a figure of speech that would 
sing his supreme contempt for certain littler 
things and little men, said: "I don't care a 
fluttering feather from a seagull's wing for 
those men and things !" 

Memories of Birds 

What man or woman among us does not 
have memories of birds? Some of us more 
than others. I knew one child not yet eight 
years of age who would sit for an hour watch- 
ing a bird build a nest, or simply watching it 
in a tree or a bush. That was play enough 
for him. And I, for one, say, bless the child 
that learns to play with birds and flowers. 
Blessed shall he be, for the birds and the flowers 
shall teach him lessons of everlasting truth that 
he could learn in no other playground of life. 

One has most vivid and distinct memories of 
scenes connected with birds, when the harmless 
hunting of birds has been a hobby with all one's 
life : I remember a phoebe that I watched for an 
hour. It was the first phoebe of spring, and it 
played around an old bridge, where they are 
frequently found. It was spring when I 
watched the first redwing blackbird. It was 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 149 

on the way to a little country church. I had 
my bird glasses with me and sat down on a 
railroad bridge and listened to that redwing 
with its sweetly rich gurgle, like water running 
softly over stones under shaded trees. There 
was another late Saturday afternoon as I was 
walking six miles along a country road to a 
little church in the country. Suddenly there 
came the singing of a bobolink, that bird which 
flies in long, swift sweeps and sings on the 
wing. I watched a newly arrived flock of these 
wonderful birds with the strange coloration of 
white on top and dark on the bottom as they 
played and chattered in low trees along the 
fence. That hour will stand out forever in my 
mind because of those newly arrived birds. I 
shall never forget a certain Sunday afternoon 
and the thrill of seeing a grosbeak in a tall 
walnut tree and watching him and his mate 
build a nest. I can see the very hillside, where 
a ravine ran through it and a little stream 
gurgled. I shall never forget that sleepy-eyed 
morning in a wood, just before daybreak, nor 
the night-hawk with its wings streaked with 
white, half asleep on a branch overhead. I 
shall never forget the first time and the very 
spot that I saw that most brilliantly colored 
red-headed woodpecker, one of three types of 



ISO OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

woodpeckers — including the hairy and the 
downy. It was beside a river ; a small river, in 
a little park, back of a hotel in Pennsylvania. 
I watched it pecking away at a tree, with its 
crimson head flashing in the sunlight and its 
coal-black body and its snow-white feathers 
scintillating together. I think there are no 
such brilliant contrasts of color in any bird. I 
shall never forget the orchard in California 
where a Baltimore oriole flashed through the 
green trees with its orange and crimson. Nor 
the brilliant mid-morning when I saw my first 
scarlet tanager; nor that afternoon on the 
banks of the Ohio where I caught my first 
glimpse of the crimson cardinal (red bird). 

And just a few days ago I added another 
bird picture to the everlasting gallery. I was 
watching a great airplane fly overhead. As I 
was watching that plane, suddenly a vibrating 
humming-bird shot like a blaze of fire across 
my vision and poised itself like a quivering 
tuning fork in the air before a crimson trumpet 
flower and then shot its long beak into the heart 
of the flower to extract the honey. I turned 
from the plane and forgot it. It was so feeble, 
and so helpless, and so uninteresting compared 
with that humming-bird. 

Once, at another time, I remember being im- 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 151 

pressed with the superiority of the bird in the 
air over man. It was in Boston and I was 
watching my first air-flight exhibit. It was a 
thrilling day. Such heights as ten thousand 
feet in the air astonished the world then. It 
was a windy day. Several of the most spectac- 
ular stunts were not allowed and not possible 
that day because a wind of sixty-five miles an 
hour was blowing. And all the while a lot 
of seagulls were soaring leisurely through the 
air against the wind and playing like children 
let out of school in summertime; taking the 
wind waves in long, graceful sweeps, with per- 
fect ease, now flapping their great white 
strong wings leisurely; now floating like a 
coasting automobile, or swimming, swept on 
the crest of a great surf wave. And all the 
while man's engines were spluttering and 
thundering and noising about over the grounds, 
getting as if ready to fly and flying not. 

God's Care for Us 

"He shall cover thee with his feathers, and 
under his wings shalt thou trust/' All through 
the Book, prophets and poets and teachers — 
aye, the eternal Christ himself — try to show to 
humanity God's care for his children with a 
bird figure. It is a beautiful figure. There is 



152 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

but one other as beautiful, and that is the old, 
old figure of the shepherd caring for his sheep ; 
and this is always the most tender of all to me. 
Another day, as David watched a mother 
bird flying over her nest, he cried out, "I will 
trust in the covert of thy wings/' Somehow 
we have learned to expect from the bird life 
this protection to young. Even to-day, as we 
study bird life, we find innumerable stories of 
mother birds and father birds who have been 
willing to sacrifice themselves that their young 
may live. Perhaps the most striking and uni- 
versal illustration of this willingness to self 
sacrifice is found in the story of the quail. And 
what boy who has lived in the woods has not 
seen an example of it time and time again? 
We have seen a mother quail, when one 
approached her nest of young ones, run out 
and throw herself on the ground, simulating a 
broken wing that she might lead the stranger 
away from her family. She was willing to 
throw herself into the path of danger and even 
to sacrific her own life that her young might 
be safe. Once in a little village that I know in 
the East this story of the sacrifice of a bird 
came to the attention of some of my own 
friends. It was a common pair of martins. 
They had for years built their nest in a little 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 153 

bird house on the public square. When fall 
came each year they would go South together 
— this loving pair of birds. But one fall they 
did not go. The folks saw the male bird flying 
in and out of the nest, just as if he intended to 
stay. Frosts came and still he did not go. The 
female bird was not seen. It grew colder and 
colder, and people wondered why the birds did 
not go South. They would freeze to death 
when the ice and snow came. The male bird 
kept going and coming all the time, carrying 
food into the box. Then one morning they 
found him frozen at the bottom of the nest, and, 
when they climbed up to the box, they found 
out why he had remained behind when the 
other birds had gone. They found that the 
mate of this bird had in some way gotten a 
heavy string fastened to her foot and could not 
fly, and, rather than leave her, he had remained 
behind in spite of the age-old instinct to migrate 
when the winter came. He had remained loyal 
even unto death. He would not desert his mate 
and let her starve to death. 

And so we can see that there was no better 
way, no tenderer way for David to make clear 
God's great Fatherly care and love for us, his 
willingness even to sacrifice his own Son, than 
in the words he used as he saw a mother bird 



154 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

hovering over her nest with protecting wings : 
"He shall cover thee with his feathers, and 
under his wings shalt thou trust/' 

God Desires that We Trust Him 

The birds teach us not only God's care for 
us, but they teach us to put our trust in him. 
They teach us faith in him and in his power 
and strength. David gives us the text again : 
"In the Lord I put my trust : how say ye to my 
soul, flee as a bird to your mountain ?" Or, 
again, "I will trust in the covert of thy wings." 
Or, again, "I will haste me to a shelter from 
the stormy wind and tempest." 

Here God is pictured as a great mountain 
rock, as a mountain of hope, as a great rugged 
tree in which we may trust and find shelter 
from the stormy blast. 

There are several versions of the origin of 
that great hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my soul." 
Probably the best-known story concerning its 
production is that in which the author is pic- 
tured as "sitting at an open window, when a 
little bird, pursued by a hawk, flew in and took 
refuge in the poet's bosom," the incident sug- 
gesting the hymn. While this story in itself 
has no historical support, it may well be 
adapted to the troubles and distresses of this 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 155 

present life. The poor, helpless bird may 
typify many a stricken human soul. Such a 
soul — a woman — came to my attention once 
while I was preaching at a camp meeting. She 
wrote a pathetic letter, and said in that letter : 

Dear Mr. Stidger: 

Please forgive me for this intrusion, but I am writing 
to you in hopes of your being able to help my husband in 
his terrible conflict. 

I am heartbroken and have all but gone insane the past 
year, for my husband, through prosperity and worldly 
companions in business, has backslidden terribly. And O, 
Mr. Stidger, still worse — he has permitted another woman 
to come into his life, and now he says he is going to break 
up our home, leaving me and our baby girl, five years old 
(though when he was an ardent Christian he pleaded to 
God for her and promised to raise her for him). 

He has been so near insanity with his sin that he has 
even threatened suicide. My parents and I prevailed on 
him to drive down to your meetings last week, and he was 
much impressed with your sermons, and since Sunday he 
has said he knew he had done wrong, but through his 
pride and stubborn nature he is not willing to yield. He 
has promised to take us down again Sunday and — forgive 
me for making suggestions — but how I wish you might 
have some kind of a service Sunday asking for those who 
have wandered away and want to get back to the Lord to 
come forward to the altar, or some such service. My 
prayer is: "Anything, Lord, to bring him to thee." We 
will be at the morning service and I rather expect will 
stay for the evening service. 

We are Methodists and members of . 

I pray, Mr. Stidger, that Sunday may be the day of victory 



156 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

in our home. Thanking you for your confidence and in- 
terest, I am, 

A heartbroken wife, 



The storm was buffeting this poor woman 
and her home and her child and her husband 
about. It was dashing their little home to 
pieces against the cliffs of life. She felt help- 
less in the sweep of it. 

It was a week after I had received that 
letter, and Sunday night. As I was leaving the 
great auditorium of the camp grounds a pretty 
little woman came up to me timidly. She was 
leading by the hand a dear little girl about the 
age of my own baby. There were tears in her 
eyes. She was trembling with suppressed 
emotion. At first she could not speak. We 
stood in the darkness for a few minutes and I 
watched the shadows of evening play on the 
white sand dunes and the stars shining in the 
purple waters of the sea as I waited until she 
could command her feelings. 

"Well," I asked her, "are you happy about 
something?" 

"Yes," she replied, "I am the woman who 

wrote you that letter from . Did 

you get it ?" 

I told her that I had received it. 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 157 

Then she told me of how her husband had 
that morning, following my invitation, risen in 
his place and, before a great crowd, with hun- 
dreds of others, walked up the aisles of the 
auditorium and knelt at the altar ; that he had 
come home happy and laughing in his soul to 
be the same tender man that he had been before 
the unhappiness had come into his life. As she 
got to talking of what that thing meant to her 
home and to her baby and to her own life, she 
choked up and could scarcely speak at all. 
After a moment's silence she held out her hand 
and said: "I cannot tell you. I cannot talk. 
But you understand, don't you ?" 

Yes, I understood. I have always under- 
stood. I have understood from the beginning 
that, when the storms come into our lives and 
we seem swept on blasts that are so much 
stronger than we, swept in among the rocks by 
waves that are overpowering, swept in by 
primordial passions and sins and lusts, there 
is but one place to flee : 

"I will haste me to a shelter, from the stormy 
wind and tempest/' 

"I will trust in the covert of thy wings." 

God's Love for Us 
The birds also teach God's love for us. 



158 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Jesus himself gave us the text : "O Jerusalem, 
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how 
often would I have gathered thy children to- 
gether, even as a hen gathereth her chickens 
under her wings, and ye would not." 

Of all the birds on earth the most despised is 
the sparrow, because it is so common. The 
sparrow has about twenty different species. I 
know five or six of them. There are the song 
sparrow, the vesper sparrow, the field sparrow, 
the white-throated sparrow, the common Eng- 
lish sparrow, etc. It is a very common bird. It 
has five to six hatchings a year and from 
twenty to thirty new sparrows come forth. It is 
indeed a common bird. It is not a pretty bird, 
either in color or form or song. It eats of the 
dunghills. It is so common. It is despised and 
hunted and shot by man. All over the earth 
it is one of the outcast birds. 

It is an outcast bird everywhere but in the 
Bible. In her chapter on the Bible, Mrs. 
Porter does not list the sparrow with the birds 
of "abomination." No! Why not? It is 
despised of man. She does not list it there 
because the Bible has given even the common 
sparrow — the meanest, lowest, ugliest, com- 
monest of all birds — an exalted place. It has 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 159 

told of how "even the sparrow'' hath found her 
a nest in the temple. And Jesus himself 
declares that not even one sparrow falleth to 
earth without the Father's knowledge. 

Anybody can love a beautiful scarlet tanager, 
or a Baltimore oriole, or a pretty wren, or a 
grosbeak, or a flashing redwing; anybody can 
love and admire a mighty eagle soaring along 
the river pathway; anybody can love the spot- 
less white of a seagull; anybody can love a 
vibrant humming bird or a nightingale, sweet 
with dripping music; or a lark soaring in the 
skies, "a sightless song" ; or a dove in a green 
tree at springtime, even though its note is 
mournful. Anybody can love the sweet, sad 
music of a whip-poor-will, or a yellow summer 
bird ; but it takes a great Fatherheart, it takes 
our God, to love a sparrow, a common sparrow, 
so that not one falls to the earth without his 
notice. 

And he not only loves us, but he has infinite 
power to help us when we need him. We can 
trust him for that forever. We can trust him, 
for he loves us with an everlasting love. We 
can trust him even when we do not know why 
he is doing certain things to us. 

There is the story of the naturalist who was 
watching an eagle teach her eaglet to fly. The 



160 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

nest was up on a high cliff. The naturalist 
noticed a lot of excitement and fluttering on 
the cliff, and he crept close above the cliff to 
see what was going on. He saw the mother 
eagle forcibly push her eaglet off the cliff to 
teach it to fly. Then she watched it with her 
eagle eye. When she saw that it was not going 
to bear itself up at the first attempt, she darted 
downward, and flying under the falling bird, 
gently swept up under it and let it rest on her 
broad, strong back. Then she carried it back 
to the cliff. 

After a while she pushed it off again. Tne 
action seemed almost brutal, but the naturalist 
understood. Then the mother eagle watched it 
a second time as it struggled to fly, and succeed- 
ing but poorly at it. Then a second time she 
swept down under it before it hit the rocks 
below and gently let it alight on her broad back 
and carried it back to the cliff. A third time 
she pushed it off and repeated her performance 
of sweeping down under it before it was dashed 
to death, and again carried it on her strong 
wings back to safety, and finally in this manner 
taught it to fly. 

And so, figuratively speaking, it is that God 
often teaches us to fly. No matter how much 
we may misunderstand what is happening to us, 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 161 

no matter how helpless we are, no matter how 
far we fall, no matter how much danger looms 
ahead, no matter how much everybody and 
everything — even God himself — may seem to 
have forsaken us, we may always know that 
God is still up there "keeping watch above his 
own"; still up there on the cliff, watching to 
see the moment when we need him most; still 
up there watching, and not one of us shall fall 
without his notice ; not one of us needs him and 
cries unto him that he will not come; still up 
there knowing our weaknesses; knowing that 
our attempts to soar and fly are, after all, but 
feeble attempts; still up there with his great 
strong wings of love, ready to fly down under 
us and catch us when we fall ; and shelter us in, 
the shadow of his wings ; and carry us up, up,, 
up to heights of glory and hope and everlasting- 
peace. 

He it is who gives the gull such fearless; 
wings; he who puts such flame in the sea gull's 
breast as makes that glorious bird swing to the 
storm with laughter in its heart, swing out on 
the trackless shoreless deep as if the law of 
gravitation to it were but a little thing. 

To those who have lived by or sailed the sea 
streams the gull is ever and always a new 
adventure, whether one sees it days out beyond 



162 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

the furthermost sentinel or rocky island or 
tumbling its white winged beauty over a bay or 
inland lake. One of the most beautiful things 
I ever saw was the changing reflection of the 
blue, green, purple waters of Lake Tahoe on 
the under white of a sea gull's wings. 

I called that beautiful thing to the attention 
of a friend, and he said, "Yes, and did it ever 
occur to you that that gull's wings have to be 
clean in order to reflect the waters of the lake?" 
And so, I take it, we too have to be clean and 
white and pure in order to reflect the beauty 
and glory of God's love to folks. 

Far out at sea on the way home from the 

Orient the sea gulls met us. They were not 

land gulls but what are called by the sailors sea 

birds. They live at sea most of the time, and 

rest on the waves when they are w r eary with 

flying, and it is a beautiful thing to see their 

long, slender, graceful wings spread as they 

skim the waters and finally light, like a downy 

feather, without a ripple of blue water breaking 

the surface. 

Birds of the boundless deep, 

Where do you rest when you sleep? 

Forever and ever you seem 

To swing on the ocean's stream 

And ever and ever your broad wings sweep 

Over the restless, boundless deep. 



THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 163 

"We rest when the night is near, 
Rest without thought or fear; 
Drop to our rest 
On the great broad breast 
Of the ocean's swing and sweep, 
In the ocean's love and keep." 

Birds of the ocean way, 
How can you laugh and play? 
How can you flash and swing 
Your beautiful spread of wing 
With never a thought of the far- 
Flung leagues where the mountains are, 
When land is so far away 
And waning the light of day ? 

"We spread our wings on the winds of light 
And rest in the calm of the starlit night ; 
The deep is our habitat — we fly 
By a faith that lightens the earth and sky ; 
For faith is a flame that burns in the breast 
Of a creature out on the boundless quest." 

Then teach me, bird of the ocean blue, 
The faith that burns in the heart of you — 
Teach me to spread my wings and fly 
Out on the deep when the storms beat high; 
Teach me to fly and be at rest 
Wherever my path, on the Father's breast. 

Teach me, bird of the boundless deep, 

That faith will ever and ever keep; 

Though stable ways of the land be far; 

And never the sky shows out a star; 

Teach me that faith is a flame in the breast— 

A flame that is urge and a flame that is rest. 



CHAPTER IX 
BURBANK AND THE BOOK 

Spiritual Principles of Luther Burbank 

FEW people know Luther Burbank as a 
great spiritual man. They know him as 
the great plant-breeder and as the great 
scientist, but few know him as a man who con- 
sciously or unconsciously works in the plant 
world on a solid foundation of great spiritual 
principles that have their birth in the Bible, 
a book for which this great man professes the 
deepest reverence, and which he reads continu- 
ally. 

Readers may wonder why I put these two 
concluding chapters on Luther Burbank and 
John Muir in this book. I answer, that I do it 
with a purpose, and that purpose is to link the 
two great out-of-doors men of this day and age 
with the great out-of-doors men of the Book of 
books. I do not mean by that to place them 
alongside of the prophets and poets of the Bible, 
but only to show that any men who are close 
to nature are also close to God and truth and 
righteousness. I insert them here also because I 

164 



BURBANK AND THE BOOK 165 

have in recent years been so deeply impressed 
with the great spiritual truths that guided the 
lives of these two great modern men of nature. 
There is some close connecting link between a 
love for God and a love for nature. I have 
discovered it in the lives of these two men. 
Each man, as he has discovered the secrets of 
nature, has been drawn closer to God, just as 
were Isaiah, Job, David, and John of old. 
Those who know, and knew, Burbank and Muir 
intimately testify to the deep spirituality of 
their lives. Indeed, they worked with great 
spiritual forces. 

One of the most impressive things about Mr. 
Burbank' s personality, his methods of living, 
his work, and his thought world to me is the 
spiritual impress of it on the whole. One feels 
when he is in the presence of Mr. Burbank that 
he is dealing with a great spiritual dynamo; a 
tremendous spiritual medium. I have not 
come to the place where I can follow Lodge into 
the spiritual world and have communion with 
folks over there, but I had the strangest feeling 
as I stood in the presence of Luther Burbank, 
and heard of the wonders he has worked, that 
here was an uncanny man, a man who has 
somehow reached out and gotten hold of in- 
visible forces and harnessed them. And yet he 



166 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

is none of that. He is just a simple, plain man 
who loves nature and who dislikes more than 
anything else to be called "uncanny/' That he 
cannot abide. And yet there are great funda- 
mental spiritual truths at the very basis of his 
work, truths that obtrude themselves into your 
heart by their very apparentness. 

The first observation I want to make of the 
spiritual implications of his work with plant 
life is that ofttimes out of a weed may spring a 
beautiful flower. Time and time again Mr. 
Burbank has developed a beautiful flower of 
purity and whiteness and perfume out of a 
despised weed that has been an outcast and a 
leper for centuries. An instance of this one 
finds in the Shasta daisy; a flower despised by 
farmers in the East, but one which he has 
developed until it takes a place among the most 
graceful and beautiful of all. 

In Mr. Harwood's book, New Creations in 
Plant Life, 1 the most understanding and sympa- 
thetic of all the books written about Mr. Bur- 
bank, and written after careful months of living 
with him in intimate friendship, the author, in 
speaking of this possibility that ever exists in 
the rankest weed and outcast plant, uses this 



1 The Macmillan Company, Publishers, New York. 



BURBANK AND THE BOOK 167 

striking sentence: "Now and then out of the 
muck of some slum, reeking with moral filth, 
and developing with unwholesome rapidity the 
seeds of anarchy and crime, a white, pure life 
springs up, persists, maintains its guard 
against all temptations, comes back, mayhap in 
later years to help redeem its birthplace." And 
so it is with the human life. Sometimes out of 
the muck and slime of tenement districts, out 
of the swamps, the black swamps of human life, 
a white flower of celestiallike purity may spring 
to redeem its surroundings. 

A second spiritual principle that Mr. Bur- 
bank finds in the world in which he works is 
the principle that you can redeem a plant by 
giving it a new foundation on which to work. 

He finds a certain fruit with a high per- 
centage of sugar and flavor which seems to be 
degenerating. What can be done to save it? 
"Why, give it a new foundation on which to 
work and live and build. So he grafts it into a 
new life. He gives it the regenerative power 
of new blood and this redeems the plant." And 
nowhere does he fail to leave the implication 
that this is true in human life. And nowhere 
can a thoughtful man fail to catch the implica- 
tion that a human life that is degenerated and 
that is losing grip and losing hope, grafted on 



168 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

the life of the sturdy, pure stock of Jesus the 
Christ will be redeemed and started on a new 
life with a new foundation. It is a thrilling 
parallel ; infinite with possibilities. 

A third spiritual simile is that found in trees. 
It might be stated in this sentence : "It is what 
is inside the soul that tells for eternity." It 
was in his experimentation with trees that this 
principle was enunciated. It was in trying to 
develop a tree with wood hard enough for com- 
mercial purposes. In this work the most im- 
portant thing is the grain. You cannot tell 
from the outside of a tree, according to Mr. 
Burbank, just what the inside grain will be. 
It may be light or dark ; it may be close-grained 
or coarse ; it may be plain or beautiful ; but you 
cannot tell from the- outside what is on the 
inside, and it is what is on the inside that counts 
in the manufacturing of various commercial 
articles. 

And so it is in the light of eternity. It is 
what is on the inside of a human soul that 
counts in the eyes of God. One may be fair 
without and well groomed, and have such 
standing in a community as kings might envy, 
but the supreme test of eternity is what is on the 
inside of a human soul. 

Mr. Burbank himself is the best human illus- 



BURBANK AND THE BOOK 169 

tration of this spiritual principle I ever saw. 
He always wears old clothes. In fact, if one 
met him on the highway alone, he might take 
him for a loafer or a tramp. All he would 
need would be a roll over his shoulder. His 
clothes are frequently covered with dirt because 
he is so often on his knees among his flowers. 
But inside Luther Burbank is a veritable 
spiritual king. 

A fourth spiritual principle is that "By care- 
ful breeding, food and love, the most insignifi- 
cant plant on earth may become the most signi- 
ficant/' It was by searching out the humble, 
unobtrusive little golden California poppy, that 
hid its sweetness in the desert air, that Mr. 
Burbank found a streak of crimson in one petal, 
and from that tiny streak he developed a full- 
blown crimson poppy. It was from the wild 
beach plum, a knotty, gnarled, bitter-to-the- 
taste, sour, and insignificant outcast, that he 
developed the giant new plum that is five hun- 
dred times the size of the beach plum. It was 
from the wild Arizona potato, so knotty and 
small and insignificant that they were no larger 
than peanuts, that Luther Burbank developed 
the great, new Burbank potato to its full per- 
fection. From a black desert potato, no larger 
and with about the same looks as a dried-up 



170 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

raisin, came this great, fruity, sugary product. 
It was from the insignificant wild daisy, 
scrawny and small and despised, that he 
developed the beautiful Shasta daisy. And so 
on and on the story might continue. 

And so one is led to see that no child is so 
puny or so ugly or so unfortunate or so insig- 
nificant-looking but that, with love and care 
and food and sunlight, that child may develop 
into a miracle of power on earth among men. 
And what is true of a child is true of a man or 
a woman, as Jesus undoubtedly knew when 
he forgave so tenderly the woman taken in 
adultery. 

The fifth spiritual lesson is the summing-up 
of the relations of breeding plant life to that of 
breeding children in spiritual life. It may be 
stated in four sentences : "The child is the most 
sensitive plant on earth" ; "The child is the most 
plastic plant on earth" ; "It will respond to 
repetition just as a plant will" ; and "Once 
■fixed, a quality or spiritual power and a trait 
will stay with a child forever" 

Mr. Burbank gave me these four spiritual 
principles from his own lips as we got to talk- 
ing about his hobby, which is children. 

The sixth great spiritual thought is that if 
one looks patiently enough for and searches 



BURBANK AND THE BOOK 171 

in love he may find the soul, hidden though it 
may be, of any plant, human or otherwise. 

One of the most thrilling stories of Mr. Bur- 
bank's work is that of the discovery of the soul 
of the dahlia. As his friends themselves tell it, 
one day he was walking along in his gardens at 
dusk, that part of the day when perfumes are 
strongest in California. One who has driven 
in the evening will remember this fact. As he 
was walking among his dahlia beds he suddenly 
detected a strangely sweet odor. Upon dis- 
covering the particular plant that was giving 
off this perfume, faint though it was, rather 
than the usual disagreeable odor of the dahlia, 
he isolated it at once and developed it. 

Another evening he was walking among his 
verbenas, and he caught an elusive scent. He 
got down on his knees and searched for it all of 
one evening, but failed to find it. He tried time 
and time again when he caught that strange 
scent and, finally, in a burst of joy found the 
plant. It had the subtle fragrance of the trail- 
ing arbutus. He had "found the soul" of both 
of these flowers. Flowers that he thought never 
had had any odor but an ugly one .he discovered 
had wrapped up in their beautiful bodies and 
petals a wonderfully sweet perfume. 

And so, the implication always is from Mr. 



172 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Burbank, that so it may be with what seems to 
be a soulless and a heartless human child or 
man. 

A seventh great spiritual truth suggested by 
Mr. Burbank is that a plant-breeder is "an 
explorer into the infinite." How much more 
so then is one who deals with the plant called 
a human being "an explorer into the infinite" ! 

The eighth and last great spiritual principle 
with which Mr. Burbank works in the plant 
world is that expressed in a sentence I heard 
him use : "I have been compelled to put the old 
selves of some plants to death that out of this 
death there might come forth a new resurrec- 
tion." And therein he has summed up the prin- 
ciple that has made Calvary and the third day 
afterward the most active spiritual principle in 
the hearts of humanity. And Mr. Burbank has 
come to this conclusion through literally mil- 
lions of separate experiments. He has crossed 
and recrossed. He has, as his biographer says, 
"Combined each with the other, joining them in 
a union as intimate as life, as powerful as death. 
For he was compelled to put to death their old 
selves — their long life habits, their manner of 
life — even their form and texture, all must 
give way — and from this death he would bring 
forth a new resurrection." 



BURBANK AND THE BOOK 173 

His own statements prove the deep spiritual 
impulses of the man : 

My theory of the laws and underlying principles of 
plant creation is, in many respects, opposed to the theories 
of the materialists. I am a sincere believer in a higher 
power than man's. Every atom, molecule, plant, animal 
or planet is only an aggregation of organized unit forces, 
held in place by stronger forces, thus holding them for a 
time latent, though teeming with inconceivable power. 
All life on our planet is, so to speak, just on the outer 
fringe of this infinite ocean of force. The universe is not 
half dead, but all alive. 

Reverting to his love for a little child, we 
recall the picture of Joaquin Miller, another of 
our California giants : 

"Then reaching his hands he said, lowly, 
'Of such is my kingdom/ and then 
Took the little brown babes in the holy 
White hands of the Saviour of men. 

'Tut his face down to theirs and caressed them, 
Held them close to his breast as in prayer ; 
Put their cheeks to his cheeks and, so blessed them; 
With baby hands hid in his hair." 

And, allowing that verse to bring vividly 
back once again that greatest of all scenes in 
the life of the Master, I want to link up all that 
I have said of the spiritual forces in this man's 
life, and of his love for little children in the 
final quotation from one of his addresses: "I 



174 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

love sunshine, the blue sky, trees, flowers, 
mountains, green meadows, running brooks, 
the ocean with its waves softly rippling along 
the sandy beach, or when pounding the rocky 
cliffs with its thunder and roar, the birds of the 
field, waterfalls, the rainbow, the dawn, the 
noonday, and the evening sunset — but children 
above them all." 



CHAPTER X 
MUIR AND THE MASTER 

THOSE who knew John Muir, those 
who followed his life from his boy- 
hood on, those with whom I have 
talked out here in his great West, some of 
whom knew him when he used to visit a little 
Methodist church in California, where he found 
his wife singing in the choir, that wife who 
was later his constant companion on his moun- 
tain trips ; those who know his books, know that 
in walking the high passes, in climbing the 
Shastas, the Raniers, the Saint Helens, the 
Glaciers, and Meadows and Bee Pastures, John 
Muir was always walking with God. He might 
well have stopped amid the great silences of 
some vast canyon, or amid the solemn stillness 
of some one of the more than fifteen hundred 
glacial lakes that he has found in the Sierras; 
or he might have stopped under the thundering 
of a Nevada Falls in his beloved Yosemite; or 
he might have lifted his eyes to the skies one of 
the several nights he was storm-bound on 

175 



176 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Shasta's steaming crater, or that other night 
when he climbed the great Redwood to listen to 
the storm ; he might have paused and said, amid 
the silences or amid the thundering: 

"I hear and to myself I say, 
'Why, God walks with me every day.' " 

For that is literally what God did and what 
Muir did. God and John Muir walked together 
on earth among the sequoias that were born, 
according to Edwin Markham and Muir him- 
self, before Christ ; and over the Mono Pass ; 
and across the Glacial Meadows and Bee 
Gardens; over the glaciers of Alaska, up and 
down the Atlantic Coast, and across the con- 
tinent ; and now, that he is gone, he walks with 
God amid the stars. That is sure. That was 
inevitable. No man can walk with God here 
and not walk with God over there. 

It Was No Miracle 

I have often said that it was no miracle that 
John Muir was what he was. Indeed, it would 
have been a miracle if he had not been what he 
was. It is the same with Luther Burbank. It 
is the same with Joan of Arc. It is the same 
with any great character. They are molded in 
youth. If they walk with God in youth, they 



MUIR AND THE MASTER 177 

will walk with God through life, and then in 
turn they will walk with him when the walking 
is along the celestial ways. 

I have been told by Luther Burbank himself 
that one of the first toys that he had to play 
with, when he was a child seven years old, was 
a cactus plant. He kept this plant a long time. 
It was to him what a dog is to most boys or a 
doll to a girl child. It was his to care for and 
to water and to love. It is a singular thing 
that, later in life, it was with this very plant 
that he was to make one of his greatest contri- 
butions to humanity. As one reads the life of 
Joan of Arc he finds that she "listened to God 
talk," and, because she listened to God talk, she 
led her nation out of its bondage and made her- 
self unconsciously one of the greatest heroines 
of all time. John Muir had a strange experi- 
ence when he was a boy. 

From Scotland to Wisconsin in his early 
years his playworld was out of doors. The 
birds and animals of home and the woods and 
the fields were his playfellows. During a long 
overland trip to Wisconsin John Muir lived out 
of doors, hunted, learned to love the trees, the 
fields, the mountains, the prairies, and the in- 
habitants thereof — under the ground and above 
the ground — as he loved nothing else on earth. 



178 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

With the particular early experiences that John 
Muir had, with the particular early experiences 
that Luther Burbank had, with the particular 
early influences of Joan of Arc's life it seems 
to me that it would have been a miracle if they 
had been anything other than what they were 
when they grew in years and stature. 

One night as they w r ere crossing the Amer- 
ican continent there appeared a particularly 
beautiful auroral light of wonderful colors. 
The old Scotch father, calling the family to 
come outside said to them: "Come! Come, 
mother! Come, bairns! and see the glory of 
God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red light. 
Look straight up to the crown where the robes 
are gathered. Hush, and wonder and adore, 
for surely this is the clothing of the Lord him- 
self, and perhaps he will even now appear look- 
ing down from his high heavens. " What lad 
could live under such a reverent father and 
atmosphere and not learn to see God through 
nature and not learn to love both ? 

When I talked with Mr. Burbank of John 
Muir, his great friend, he kept saying over and 
over : "John Muir was a great man ; John Muir 
was more than that : he was a good man. John 
Muir was a great man ; he was more than that : 
lie was a good man !" 



MUIR AND THE MASTER 179 

John Muir's Reverence for God 

In a wonderful chapter on 'The Water- 
Ousel" he tells of that beautiful little water- 
bird; of how it lives in the outposts of nature 
all alone; of how it inhabits the far-flung 
glaciers, cold and bleak and desolate ; of how it 
darts in and out and under and through the 
densest falls ; of how it flies in ice-caverns with- 
out a spot of light; of how he has found them 
from Mexico to Alaska, and then adds with 
reverence : "And throughout the whole of their 
beautiful lives they interpret all that we in our 
unbelief call terrible in the utterances of tor- 
rents and storms, as only varied expressions of 
God's eternal love." 

One day in Alaska, when he was studying a 
glacier that was later named for him (as has 
been a beautiful forest of redwoods near San 
Francisco), he was particularly impressed, 
and, following a vivid and scintillating descrip- 
tion of the blue and gleaming ice of the glacier, 
he says, "We rejoiced in the possession of so 
blessed a day, and came away with a feeling 
that in very foundational truth we had been in 
one of God's own temples and had seen him and 
heard him working and preaching like a man." 

He speaks of a scene in Alaska when he and 



i8o OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

Mr. Young met a new tribe, and after the 
missionary had spoken Mr. Muir was asked to 
speak. He told them of the brotherhood of 
man and the Fatherhood of God, and an old 
chief in replying said: "I have often been 
caught in a storm and held in camp until there 
was nothing to eat, but when I reached home 
and got warm and had a good meal, then my 
body felt good. For a long time my heart has 
been hungry and cold, but to-night your words 
have warmed my heart, and given it a good 
meal, and now my heart feels good." 

He tells with deep reverence a story of a 
living example of the atonement which he 
heard of among the Indians of Alaska. An old 
chief sacrificed himself for his tribe. 

There had been a war all summer between 
two strong tribes. Fall had come and the war 
was not settled. One old chief saw that, unless 
it stopped soon and his people had a chance to 
lay in their winter supply of berries and 
salmon, they would starve, so he went out under 
a truce flag to ask the chief of the other tribe to 
stop and go home, telling him the reason for 
this request. 

The other chief said that his tribe would not 
stop fighting because ten more of his men had 
been killed than of the enemy's. Then the chief 



MUIR AND THE MASTER 181 

said to him : " You know that I am a chief. I 
am worth ten of your men. Kill me in place of 
them and let us have peace." 

This sacrificial request was granted, and 
there in front of the contending tribes the old 
chief was shot. 

When Mr. Young and Mr. Muir came to this 
tribe they told them the story and then added : 
"Yes, your words are good. The Son of God, 
the Chief of chiefs, the Maker of all the world, 
must be worth more than all mankind put to- 
gether ; therefore, when his blood was shed the 
salvation of the world was made sure." 

One of his most burning descriptions is that 
of the morning that he discovered Glacier Bay. 
It was a supreme hour even in this great man's 
eventful life, when glaciers, and giant trees, 
and triumphant moments on mountain peaks at 
the top of the world were everyday experiences 
with him. I think that I have seldom seen him 
so moved as he was on this tremendous day. 

He speaks of the calm dawn, the frosty clear- 
ness of the morning, the brooding stillness ; and 
amid this stillness the thunder of new-born ice- 
bergs ; of the fact that they did not see the sun- 
rise because they were beneath the ice-cliffs; 
then of the sudden appearance of a red light 
burning with a strange splendor, an unearthly 



182 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

splendor, from the top of the utmost peak. Then 
he tells of how this light began to spread over 
everything until the "whole range of ice peaks 
was illuminated with this strange red glow like 
a crimson, furred Alpin glow/' 

"We turned away from that scene, joining 
the outgoing bergs, while 'Gloria in excelsis' 
still seemed to be sounding over all the white 
landscape, and our burning hearts were ready 
for any fate, feeling that, whatever the future 
might have in store, the treasuries we had 
gained this glorious morning would enrich our 
lives forever." 

His strange sympathy with all things that 
breathe and live is illustrated with the story of 
a school of great whales that he saw once. One 
seldom thinks to waste any sympathy on a 
whale. One has a feeling that a whale is big 
enough to take care of itself in any and all 
weather. But as John Muir watched this great 
school of monsters he makes a comment that 
for sheer warm-heartedness I think seldom has 
been equaled. His heart was even big enough 
to take in a school of whales. It was said of 
Lincoln that "his heart was as big as the world, 
but there was no room in it for the memory of 
a single wrong." And so I might say that the 
heart of John Muir was as big as the world; 



MUIR AND THE MASTER 183 

and there was room in it not only for moun- 
tains, and seas and giant sequoias, and tiny 
flowers, and mountain sheep, and Shasta lilies, 
and tiny snow flowers, and Ousel birds, but 
there was room in it for a poor lumbering 
leviathan of the seas : 

"But think of the hearts of those whales, 
beating warm against the sea, day and night, 
through dark and light, on and on for cen- 
turies ; how the red blood must gush and gurgle 
in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat !" 

His sense of humor was keen and he knew 
how to express it with a flashing sentence. He 
was describing a deserted mining camp in 
California. There was little left of what had 
once been a flourishing city in the old days. A 
tall chimney still remained with mining 
machinery rusted and ruined. Coyotes 
wandered unmolested through the city streets, 
"and of all the busy throng that had so lavishly 
spent their time and money here only one man 
remains — a lone bachelor with one suspender." 

Where can be found a more vivid, a shorter, 
sharper picture of a drip of water "petering 
out to a dribble at the end" than that phrase, 
"a lone bachelor with one suspender"? 

And then he shoots this striking epigram. 
It is illustrative of another tremendous lesson he 



184 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 

learned from nature: "But, after all, effort, 
however misapplied, is better than stagnation. 
Better toil blindly, beating every stone in turn 
for grains of gold, whether they contain any or 
not, than lie down in apathetic decay." 

And so this great out-of-doors man of the 
mountains learned, even amid earthly things, to 
walk with God. Nature was his great school- 
house, but he did not stop at that schoolhouse. 
He went on into the High School of Humanity. 
And in that high school he found a host of 
friends who forever clung to him because they 
loved him and found him a true Christian 
gentleman at heart; and finally he passed on 
into the College of God's Communion, and for- 
ever there he shall walk and talk, and study 
and dream and sketch and learn and love and 
live through eternity. When he walked up the 
mountains he never walked away from God. 
His face was always turned toward the Creator 
of all the wonders and beauties that he saw, and 
he never failed to give God credit for his handi- 
work. He knew whence it had come. 



- 






* ^ 










































\ v - 









Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces; 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2005 

PreservationTechnologiej 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIOI 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-211* 






^ ' ^ 






% 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





014 328 749 A 






\%$B& 



WES* 

1» 



In 



